The fitting room on Via Gesù is silent except for the hiss of steam and the rhythmic click of a hand-operated press

The fitting room on Via Gesù is silent except for the hiss of steam and the rhythmic click of a hand-operated press. A woman in a white coat adjusts a panel of silk chiffon printed with Barocco swirls — the kind of print that has appeared on runway after runway since 1992 — and checks the fall against a dress form. Her name is Carla Molteni. She has worked in Versace's atelier for twenty-three years. You will not find her name in the show notes.

This is the arithmetic of a maison built on spectacle: for every Medusa buckle that lands on a red carpet, there are a dozen pairs of hands that shaped, stitched, and finished it. Versace trades in iconography — the safety pin dress, the jungle print, the chainmail gown — but iconography is made, not conjured. It requires pattern cutters who can engineer a bias-cut silk to behave under stage lights, embroiderers who can anchor two thousand Swarovski crystals without puckering the ground fabric, and leather workers who can skive a lambskin panel to less than a millimetre without tearing it.

The house does not often foreground these artisans. Its mythology runs in the opposite direction: Gianni as the visionary, Donatella as the keeper of the flame, the brand itself as a living monument to excess and unapologetic glamour. Fair enough. But monuments require maintenance.

The Atelier Structure

Versace operates two primary ateliers in Milan: one for tailoring and leather, another for embroidery and embellishment. The division is not strict — a single garment often passes through both — but it reflects the house's dual heritage. Gianni Versace trained as a dressmaker in Reggio Calabria before moving north in 1972; his early work combined southern Italian craft traditions with the industrial precision he encountered in Milan's ready-to-wear studios. That tension — between the hand and the machine, the artisanal and the scalable — still governs how pieces are made.

Take the Virtus bag, introduced in 2018 and now a fixture in the house's leather-goods line. The signature element is the oversized Medusa hardware, cast in brass and plated in either gold or ruthenium depending on the colourway. But before the hardware arrives, someone has to prepare the leather. That someone is usually Luca Ferretti, a sellier who joined Versace in 2005 after a decade at a Tuscan tannery. His job: to cut, skive, and edge-paint each panel so that when the bag is assembled, the seams are invisible and the structure holds without internal reinforcement.

Ferretti works from templates, but the templates are guides, not gospel. Leather varies — a shoulder from one hide will have a different temper than a shoulder from another, even if both come from the same tannery and the same dye lot. He adjusts his blade angle by feel, checks the skive with a micrometer, and marks problem areas with tailor's chalk. The entire process, for a single Virtus, takes about ninety minutes. Then the panels move to assembly, where another artisan — often Giulia Roncato, who has been with the house since 2011 — saddle-stitches the body, attaches the hardware, and applies a final coat of edge paint. Total hands-on time: four hours, give or take. Retail price: two thousand euros and change.

Is that margin justified? One can argue both ways. What is not arguable is that the work itself is consequential. A poorly skived seam will pucker within six months. A badly set Medusa plaque will tilt. These are not defects the house can afford.

Embroidery and Embellishment

The embroidery atelier occupies the top floor of the Via Gesù building, where the light is best. This is where the more theatrical pieces — the crystal-encrusted gowns, the beaded blazers, the chainmail that is not actually mail but a grid of interlocking metal sequins — are brought to life. The head of the atelier is Margherita Colombo, who trained at the Scuola del Ricamo in Cantù and joined Versace in 1999. She oversees a team of eight full-time embroiderers, plus a rotating roster of freelancers who come in during the pre-collection push.

Colombo's signature technique is what she calls ricamo a rilievo — a form of raised embroidery in which the motif is built up in layers, starting with a padding stitch and finishing with a satin stitch that covers the padding completely. The effect is sculptural, almost three-dimensional. It appears most often on the house's baroque-inspired pieces: the ones with oversized florals, acanthus leaves, and those recurring Medusa heads.

Each motif is drawn by hand onto tulle or organza, then mounted on a frame. The embroiderer works from the reverse side, building up the padding with cotton thread before switching to silk or metallic thread for the top layer. A single Medusa head, roughly ten centimetres across, takes about six hours. A full gown — say, the gold-and-black number Zendaya wore to the 2021 BFI London Film Festival — can require upwards of two hundred hours of embroidery, spread across three artisans working in relay.

Does the client know this? Probably not. Does it matter? On balance, yes. The hand is visible if you know where to look: in the slight irregularity of the stitch tension, in the way the metallic thread catches the light at different angles depending on the direction of the stitch. A machine can approximate the effect, but it cannot replicate the micro-adjustments that a human hand makes in response to the fabric's behaviour. Tulle stretches. Organza frays. Silk charmeuse slides. The embroiderer compensates in real time.

The Leather Workshop

Downstairs, in the leather workshop, the atmosphere is less monastic. There is music — usually something from the eighties, Gianni's decade — and a low hum of conversation. The work here is more iterative, more collaborative. A prototype bag might pass through five or six hands before it is approved for production, and each artisan has veto power. If the strap attachment feels weak, it gets reinforced. If the lining fabric pulls at the seams, it gets replaced. If the turn-lock does not seat flush, the hardware team reworks the plate.

This is not romantic. It is quality control, dressed up as craft. But it is also the reason a Versace bag, for all the brand's reputation for flash, tends to hold up. The house learned early — after a run of poorly constructed handbags in the mid-nineties nearly tanked the accessories division — that hardware and marketing can only carry you so far. At some point, the object has to perform.

The current leather team is led by Stefano Moretti, a third-generation pellettiere who worked at Bottega Veneta before joining Versace in 2017. He brought with him a preference for vegetable-tanned leathers and a near-obsessive focus on edge finishing — the process of sealing and polishing the raw edges of a leather panel so that they are smooth, water-resistant, and colour-matched to the face of the leather. It is tedious work. It is also the difference between a bag that looks expensive and a bag that is expensive.

Moretti's team uses a combination of traditional and modern techniques. Edges are sanded by hand, then sealed with a cellulose-based paint applied in three coats. Each coat is heat-set and buffed before the next is applied. The final step is a wax polish, rubbed in with a wood burnisher until the edge has a glass-like finish. Total time per edge: about twenty minutes. Total edges on a structured handbag: sixteen to twenty, depending on the design.

What Comes Next

The question facing Versace — and facing most heritage maisons, if we are being honest — is whether this model is sustainable. Atelier work is slow, expensive, and difficult to scale. The artisans themselves are aging out; Colombo is sixty-one, Ferretti is fifty-seven, and neither has a clear successor. The house runs an apprenticeship programme, but it is small — four or five trainees a year — and the attrition rate is high. Younger workers, even those with formal training, often leave for steadier work in ready-to-wear or industrial production.

Donatella Versace has said, in various interviews, that the atelier is non-negotiable. Whether that remains true under Capri Holdings — the conglomerate that acquired Versace in 2018 for just over two billion dollars — is less clear. Capri has so far left the atelier structure intact, but it has also pushed the house toward faster product cycles and a heavier emphasis on logo-driven accessories. The Virtus bag, the La Medusa loafers, the Barocco-print slides — these are the products that move volume. A hand-embroidered gown does not.

One suspects the future will be bifurcated: a small, high-margin couture operation that preserves the atelier and its artisans, and a much larger ready-to-wear and accessories business that leans on the house's iconography without requiring its hands. This is not cynicism. It is pragmatism. The maison cannot survive on craft alone, and craft cannot survive without the maison's infrastructure.

But for now, the atelier on Via Gesù is still there. Carla Molteni is still adjusting panels of Barocco-print silk. Luca Ferretti is still skiving leather by hand. Margherita Colombo is still embroidering Medusa heads in ricamo a rilievo. They are not famous. Their work is.