Donatella Versace: Inheriting a House

Donatella Versace did not found the house that bears her family's name, but for almost three decades she was the person most responsible for what it looked like. Her career is best understood not as a founder's story but as the history of a successor: someone who inherited a strongly defined identity in tragic circumstances and had to decide what to keep, what to change and how to carry it forward.

A family business in Milan

The house was founded by her elder brother, Gianni Versace. Born in Reggio Calabria in 1946, he learned the trade in his mother's dressmaking atelier and moved to Milan in 1972, where he designed collections for other firms, among them Genny, Complice and Callaghan. On 28 March 1978 he presented his first women's collection under his own name at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan.

From the beginning, the business was a family enterprise with distinct roles. Their brother Santo Versace, who had trained in economics and business, joined Gianni in Milan in 1976 and took charge of the commercial side. Donatella, born in Reggio Calabria on 2 May 1955, studied languages and literature in Florence in the mid-1970s while travelling to Milan to work with Gianni, and when the company was established in 1978 she became its vice-president.

The years with Gianni

Donatella's early contribution lay in image, accessories and the house's public presence rather than in the main collections. She designed accessories, shoes and handbags, worked closely on campaigns and shows, and was entrusted with a younger line, Versus. From the mid-1990s the house referred to her as co-designer. Her role grew within a business where fashion, photography, celebrity and commerce were tightly connected, and where she was, by her own account, still learning: "The first few years I wasn't sure of myself," she later said. "I made mistakes. But you learn from your mistakes."

1997

On 15 July 1997 Gianni Versace was murdered outside his house in Miami. Donatella became creative director, and Santo chief executive. The task was unusually difficult. The house's visual language, with its saturated colour, bold prints, classical references and Medusa emblem, was closely identified with one designer, and his death left open the question of whether it could survive without him.

Her answer was neither to reproduce that language unchanged nor to abandon it. Over the following decades she maintained the house's recognisable codes while adapting them to new audiences and new forms of celebrity. She would remain in the role for almost twenty-eight years, longer than the nineteen years in which Gianni had led the house under his own name, so that much of what is now recognised as Versace was shaped under her direction.

Changes of ownership and direction

The house passed through several changes of ownership during her tenure. In 2018 it was acquired by the American group Capri Holdings. On 13 March 2025 Capri announced that Donatella would step down as creative director after twenty-eight years and become the brand's chief brand ambassador. Dario Vitale, formerly of Miu Miu, succeeded her from 1 April 2025, becoming the first person outside the Versace family to lead the house's design.

The sequence that followed was rapid. Prada Group completed its acquisition of Versace in December 2025, and Vitale left the house later that month after a single season. In February 2026 Prada Group and Versace announced the appointment of Pieter Mulier as creative director from 1 July 2026.

Reading Versace across periods

For The Archivary, garments and campaign imagery from different periods can be read as evidence of continuity and change. A print, a silhouette or the treatment of the Medusa may recall the 1980s while responding to a later moment, and the archive becomes a record of how a house manages its own visual memory across successive designers.