The most iconic moments that marked Donatella Versace’s career

The news of the change in Versace’s creative direction immediately went around the world. After thirty years at the helm of the famous fashion house that bears her surname, Donatella Versace is stepping down in favour of young designer Dario Vitale. Hers is not a farewell: she will remain Chief Brand Ambassador and will continue to take care of the brand’s philanthropic and charitable activities. However, this is an epoch-making turning point for the maison whose successes have shaped an aesthetic that has marked costume and fashion for over fifty years.

With a post on her Instagram profile, the designer was the first to make the leaked rumours official, leaving a message ideally addressed to her brother Gianni: “I hope I have made you proud so far”. Immediately came the tears and applause from insiders, fans and big stars who have linked their faces, and sometimes their success, to the Italian brand. Indeed, it is undeniable that Donatella Versace has been an undisputed protagonist of the fashion world, inheriting a task that was not easy. Let us look back together at the stages that marked her and the brand’s history in the decades in which she was creative director.

1997 was definitely her year zero: her brother Gianni was brutally murdered in front of his home in Miami Beach at the height of his glorious career as a designer. The news shook the entire world and many were ready to bet on the inevitable decline of the maison, orphaned by its founding genius. Donatella decided to take the reins of the company and in 1998 presented her first collection, challenging skeptical critics and doubtful markets.
Among the most important moments that have studded her career, it is impossible not to mention the famous Junlge Dress worn in 2000 by Jennifer Lopez at the Grammy Awards, to which we owe the birth of Google Images thanks to the impressive number of searches triggered by the web. The same dress will then be reproposed in the collection twenty years later, in 2020, by Lopez herself, as statuesque as and more than then.

The bond between Versace and the star system is symbiotic and Donatella knows how to anticipate and enhance it like no other designer. The front rows of her fashion shows are photographed as much as the catwalks, and collaborations with actors and singers are in the brand’s DNA, like the latest in 2023 with Dua Lipa. Among the campaigns that have made history, however, it is impossible not to mention those of 2005 and 2015 starring Madonna, symbol of female empowerment and audacity, and that for spring/summer 2014 with Lady Gaga who even dedicated one of her most famous hits to Donatella.

Many are the red carpets crossed by celebrities and entered the collective imagination thanks to Versace’s creations capable of hypnotising and capturing the scene just like the Medusa of epic memory. These include Angelina Jolie’s vertiginous slit, with which she enchanted the Oscars in 2012, or the numerous successes at the Met Gala: Kendall and Kylie Jenner‘s feathered gowns in 2019, Blake Lively‘s shape-shifting dress in 2022 or Zendaya’s gothic armour in 2018. The fashion house’s other special association is with the supermodels of the 1990s, whose careers were literally launched by Gianni. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of her brother’s death, during SS18, Donatella calls some of the historical muses to the catwalk for the grand finale of the collection: Carla Bruni, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Helena Christensen in a closure that has rightfully entered among the top moments of the fashion system.

Not only seduction but also irony has always been Donatella’s stylistic signature. For the FW18 campaign, she pokes fun at the mispronunciations of her surname and, in a video that has become a cult, she clarifies once and for all the correct wording of the maison’s name: “It’s Versace, not Versachee”.
2025 marks the year of her last catwalk as creative director after years symbiotic with the world of fashion and show business and after having restored the brand’s lustre by reinterpreting her brother Gianni’s creations through revisitations of his most legendary collections such as Warhol, Icons, Trésor de la Mer and Metal Mesh. One cycle closes and another one opens, as it must in an industry in constant transition and change. While we wait to discover the new course of history, all that remains for us is to bow down to a great queen of Italian fashion.

Ph: Salvatore Delle Femmine, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons