The fitting room at Via Gesù 12, sometime in 1991

The fitting room at Via Gesù 12, sometime in 1991. Gianni Versace circles a model wearing a dress constructed almost entirely from gold safety pins. He adjusts one at the hip, steps back, adjusts another at the shoulder. The dress holds. It shouldn't, but it does. Later that year, Elizabeth Hurley will wear it to a film premiere in London, and the image will circulate for three decades — not because the dress was provocative, though it was, but because it looked like it might fall apart at any moment and never did.

Versace understood early what many houses learn late: the muse is not decoration. She is structure.

Donatella: la sorella

Begin with the obvious one, because she earned it. Donatella Versace joined her brother's atelier in 1978, ostensibly as a consultant. The framing was polite. In practice, she was his sounding board, his collaborator, and eventually the woman who would inherit not just a company but a vocabulary — one built on excess, yes, but also on a kind of structural audacity that required someone to say no as often as yes.

Gianni dressed her. He draped her in the house codes before they were codes: the Baroque prints, the metal mesh, the Medusa head that would become shorthand for an entire aesthetic philosophy. She was not a passive subject. By the early nineties, she was directing campaigns, selecting models, shaping the visual language that made Versace synonymous with a particular strain of Italian glamour — one that didn't apologise.

When Gianni was killed in 1997, Donatella took over design. The press was sceptical. The first collections were uneven. But within three years, she had steadied the house and, more importantly, clarified its point of view. The spring 2000 collection — the one with the jungle-print dress that Jennifer Lopez wore to the Grammys — was not a fluke. It was proof that Donatella understood what her brother had built: not just clothes, but a system of visibility.

She remains, at seventy, the most consequential creative director Versace has ever had who isn't Gianni. That's not sentiment. That's arithmetic.

Naomi Campbell: la collaboratrice

Naomi Campbell walked her first Versace show in 1990. She was nineteen. Gianni cast her immediately and repeatedly — not as a novelty, not as a token, but as the central argument of his runway presentations. By 1991, she was closing shows. By 1995, she was appearing in Versace campaigns alongside Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista, the three of them forming what the press called the 'Trinity'. The term was overblown, but the collaboration was not.

Campbell didn't just wear the clothes. She inhabited the attitude Versace required: a kind of regal defiance, equal parts grace and refusal. The metal mesh dresses, the leather corsets, the gowns that required a specific way of walking — Campbell made them legible. She gave them context.

After Gianni's death, she became one of Donatella's closest allies. She walked the spring 1998 show, the first collection Donatella designed alone, in a gesture that was as much about solidarity as it was about fashion. She has continued to appear on Versace runways intermittently over the past two decades, most recently in 2018, when she closed the spring show at fifty-seven. The decision was sentimental, perhaps, but also strategic. Campbell's presence reminded the audience — and the industry — that Versace's history is not an archive to be referenced. It is a living relationship.

One could argue that Campbell's influence on Versace is less about any single garment and more about what she represented: a model who understood that the runway is a form of performance, and that performance requires both precision and risk. Versace built its reputation on that balance. Campbell embodied it.

Linda Evangelista: l'image

If Campbell was the collaborator, Linda Evangelista was the image. She appeared in more Versace campaigns during the 1990s than any other model, her face — and her willingness to transform it — becoming inseparable from the house's visual identity. Gianni saw in her what he saw in few others: a chameleonic quality that allowed her to wear the clothes without disappearing into them.

The collaboration began in 1990 and intensified quickly. Evangelista appeared in campaigns shot by Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and Steven Meisel, each one a study in how far a face can shift while remaining recognisable. Versace's aesthetic demanded this. The clothes were loud. The model had to be louder, or at least equally committed.

What made Evangelista essential to Versace was not her beauty — though that was considerable — but her willingness to engage with the artifice. She wore the Medusa prints, the gold lamé, the PVC corsets, and she wore them as if they were reasonable choices. That's a skill. It's also a kind of editorial intelligence that can't be taught.

She cut her hair short in 1989, a decision that might have ended another model's career. For Evangelista, it became a signature. Versace responded by dressing her in increasingly sculptural pieces, garments that required a strong face and a stronger attitude. The cropped hair made the clothes more legible. It also made Evangelista more versatile — she could shift from androgynous to hyperfeminine within a single campaign, and Versace used that range relentlessly.

By the mid-nineties, Evangelista had become so identified with the house that her absence would have been conspicuous. She wasn't just modelling the clothes. She was modelling a worldview: one in which femininity was a construct, and construction was an art form.

What remains

Versace no longer operates the way it did in the nineties. The house was sold to Capri Holdings in 2018, and Donatella remains as creative director, though the structure around her has shifted. The muses have aged, or stepped back, or moved into other roles. Campbell still walks occasionally. Evangelista has largely withdrawn from public life. Donatella continues.

What these three women share is not a look, though each had one. It's a willingness to participate in the construction of an image, to understand that fashion at this level is not about self-expression but about collaboration. Gianni needed them. Donatella needs them still, even in their absence, because they established the terms. They made Versace legible.

The current campaigns feature younger models, as they should. But the template remains: women who can carry the weight of the house's aesthetic without collapsing under it. That's not a small ask. It requires a particular combination of discipline and bravado, and it's rarer than the industry likes to admit.

One suspects that when historians look back at Versace's most influential period, they will point to these three women — not as muses in the passive sense, but as architects. They built something alongside Gianni and Donatella. The house still stands on that foundation.