Gianni Versace Women's Fashion Brand

Giovanni Maria Versace was an Italian fashion designer and founder of Versace, an international fashion house that produces clothing, accessories, fragrances, make-up and more. After opening his Milan boutique in 1978, Versace quickly became a sensation on the international fashion scene. A founder-named house, a Milan boutique, and a rise that was a sensation: those are the founding facts, and they frame everything the women's line became.

His designs employed vivid colors, bold prints, and sexy cuts, which were a refreshing contrast to the prevailing taste for muted colors and simplicity. That single sentence is the brand's whole design argument. Where the prevailing taste muted, Versace saturated; where it simplified, he printed; where it covered, he cut close. A women's shopper reading this page should hold that contrast in mind, because it is still the test of a Versace piece: it is not meant to blend into a wardrobe of neutrals, and judging it by neutral standards misses what it is for.

Oroton: the 1982 Chainmail Innovation

Among Versace's most famous innovations was his 1982 invention of a type of super-light chainmail called 'Oroton', which became a signature material in his outfits. Pause on what that invention actually is: chainmail - a metal mesh with a warrior's weight in every imagination - re-engineered to be super-light, so it could move as cloth moves and be worn as an evening garment is worn. Turning armour into drape is a material invention, not a styling trick, and it became a signature precisely because no muted, simple wardrobe could contain anything like it.

For a buyer, a named material innovation is a practical shopping tool. Signature materials carry a house's identity more reliably than logos: Oroton mesh, vivid colour and bold print are the three identifiers of this brand, and a piece that shows them is working in the house's true language. Judge such pieces by the material itself - mesh should flex evenly and lie smoothly, prints should be placed rather than merely repeated, colour should be saturated and even - and by cut, since a close cut leaves nowhere for poor construction to hide.

Shopping the Versace Women's Line

Shop this label by its stated range: clothing first, then the accessories, fragrances and make-up the profile lists as the house's other productions. In clothing, the vivid-and-bold rule helps rather than hinders: a Versace print piece is a wardrobe's event garment, so buy it in a cut you will wear repeatedly and let it carry simple companions, instead of asking it to be versatile in ways its design refuses. Check prints at the seams - pattern that continues across a seam line is considered construction - and check vivid dyes for evenness in daylight.

Care follows the materials honestly: a super-light metal mesh and vivid printed silks are specialist garments, cleaned and stored as their labels direct, hung or folded away from the abrasion of rougher pieces. This page also links onward to Apparel Search's Gianni Versace designer profile, where the designer's record is kept separately from this brand listing. A Milan boutique of 1978, a sensation built on vivid colour against a muted era, and a chainmail made light enough to wear in 1982: that is the Versace record, and it is enough to shop the line by - colour, print, cut, and the mesh that made metal into cloth.

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