The fitting room at Via Gesù 12 smells faintly of steam and coffee

The fitting room at Via Gesù 12 smells faintly of steam and coffee. Donatella Versace stands before a mannequin draped in what will become — in three weeks, under the lights at Milan — a column dress in acid-green silk jersey, slashed at the hip, secured with a single gold safety pin the size of a cigarette lighter. She adjusts the drape with her left hand, steps back, considers. "Non così," she says to no one in particular, and the seamstress reaches for her shears.

Donatella has occupied the role of creative director at Versace since 1997, following the death of her brother Gianni. The appointment was not, at the time, universally welcomed. She had spent the previous decade as his closest collaborator — muse, sounding board, occasional lightning rod — but had never designed a collection under her own name. Critics wondered aloud whether she possessed the technical command, the vision, the steel. Twenty-six years later, the question has been answered, though perhaps not in the terms originally posed.

Formation

She was born in Reggio Calabria in 1955, the youngest of four children. Her mother ran a dressmaking atelier; Donatella grew up amid bolts of fabric and the clatter of industrial machines. Gianni, eleven years her senior, had already left for Milan by the time she reached adolescence. She followed in 1976, ostensibly to study languages at the Università degli Studi. She did not finish. Gianni had launched his first collection under his own label in 1978, and Donatella became, in effect, his first employee — though the role had no title and, for a time, no salary.

Her early responsibilities were diffuse: styling, casting, public relations in the years before the term was formalised. Gianni trusted her eye for women's bodies, for the way a hemline would read in motion, for the performers and actresses who could carry his more theatrical impulses without disappearing beneath them. By the mid-Eighties she was overseeing the Versus diffusion line, a younger, more aggressive sibling to the main collection. The work was collaborative to the point of invisibility. Gianni signed everything; Donatella shaped much of it.

The inheritance

Gianni was killed on the steps of his Miami Beach villa in July 1997. Donatella was in the house. She inherited creative control of the maison by default — there was no other candidate within the family, and Gianni had left no deputy. Her first solo collection, for Spring 1998, landed four months later. It was, by most accounts, a careful exercise in continuity: the same Baroque flourishes, the same unapologetic sex appeal, the same primary-colour intensity. Reviewers were polite. Some used the word 'competent', which in fashion criticism is rarely a compliment.

What followed was a decade of unevenness. Donatella seemed at times to be designing in her brother's voice, at others to be searching for her own. The house remained profitable — celebrity endorsement, particularly in music and film, kept the brand visible — but the critical consensus held that Versace had become a symbol of a certain kind of Nineties excess, now dated. The financial crisis of 2008 did not help. By 2009, the company was carrying significant debt, and there were rumours of a sale.

Signature

The shift, when it came, was gradual. Around 2012, Donatella began to strip back. The Medusa heads remained, the Greek key borders, the safety pins — but the silhouettes grew cleaner, the palette more disciplined. She leaned into tailoring, particularly for women: sharply cut blazers with exaggerated shoulders, trousers that sat low on the hip and broke cleanly at the ankle. The sexiness did not disappear; it relocated. Where Gianni's work had been about exposure, Donatella's became about tension — the suggestion of a body beneath fabric engineered to resist and reveal in equal measure.

Her Spring 2018 collection, shown in September 2017, marked a turning point. The finale brought together Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Carla Bruni, Claudia Schiffer, and Helena Christensen — the so-called supers, all of whom had walked for Gianni in the early Nineties. The gesture could have read as nostalgia. Instead, it clarified something: Donatella was not imitating her brother. She was in conversation with him, and the conversation had become confident enough to include a direct quotation.

The collection itself was less discussed than the finale, which is a pity. The clothes — chain-mail dresses in black and gold, leather trench coats lined in silk twill, slip dresses with asymmetric hems — demonstrated a command of proportion and a willingness to let a single element (a neckline, a sleeve) carry the entire gesture. One noticed, too, a new attention to fabric weight. Versace had always been about surface — print, embellishment, shine — but here the surface was earning its presence through structure.

The present tense

Versace was sold to Michael Kors Holdings (now Capri Holdings) in 2018 for just over two billion dollars. Donatella retained her position and, reportedly, a degree of creative autonomy unusual in such arrangements. The collections since have continued the trajectory established in 2017: confident, focused, uninterested in apology. She has also, in recent seasons, begun to reference her own archive — not Gianni's, but the work she has produced since 1997. A safety-pin dress from 2019 echoed a similar piece from her Spring 2004 collection, itself a reworking of the famous Hurley dress from 1994. The layering is deliberate.

Her approach to celebrity dressing has evolved as well. Where once the maison courted visibility at any cost, Donatella now exercises a degree of curation. (One notes the term is unavoidable here, though I use it reluctantly.) Recent red-carpet appearances — Zendaya at the 2021 BFI London Film Festival, Anne Hathaway at Cannes in 2022 — have favoured restraint over spectacle, though the clothes remain unmistakably Versace. The house has also expanded its presence in menswear, an area Gianni dominated in the Nineties but which had, until recently, felt secondary under Donatella's direction.

What remains

To assess Donatella's tenure fairly requires setting aside the question of influence — Gianni's shadow, the weight of the archive, the expectations of a certain kind of fashion nostalgia — and looking instead at output. The work is consistent, commercially successful, and technically accomplished. It does not, on the whole, provoke in the way Gianni's work once did, nor does it seem interested in provocation for its own sake. What it offers instead is a kind of sustained competence, which in an industry prone to chaos and churn is perhaps more difficult to maintain than brilliance.

She remains, at sixty-eight, the face of the house — a role she has never appeared entirely comfortable with, though she performs it without complaint. One suspects the next chapter will involve a succession plan, though no candidate has been named publicly. Whether Versace can survive a second transition remains an open question. For now, the maison continues, and Donatella continues with it, adjusting hems and considering drape in a fitting room that smells of steam and coffee, making small corrections that will be invisible to everyone but her.