Donatella Versace Is Building a Brand of Her Own

The move comes eighteen months after Versace stepped down as chief creative officer of the house that bears her family name, ending nearly three decades in the role she assumed after Gianni Versace’s death in 1997. Since then, Prada Group has acquired Versace, while Dario Vitale’s brief tenure gave way to Pieter Mulier.

Her new venture gives Donatella Versace something radically different: the chance to build without an existing archive, corporate history or family surname defining the product before it launches.

Revolve will provide the technology, infrastructure and global distribution network, while Donatella Versace brings a creative vision. The project is planned for the United States, Latin America, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, with ambitions extending beyond runway fashion into beauty and entertainment.

The partnership also reflects a newer way of building fashion businesses. Revolve brings digital infrastructure, global distribution and direct access to a younger consumer base; Donatella Versace brings something far harder to manufacture: decades of cultural memory.

Her name already carries a complete visual vocabulary. Body-conscious glamour, saturated colour, celebrity dressing, sex appeal and the collision between pop culture and luxury have all been central to the world she helped construct at Versace. She also enters the project with long-standing relationships across music, film and entertainment, giving the new venture cultural reach before its first product even appeared.

That makes the collaboration more about testing whether an established creative identity can become a new house without the archive that originally shaped it.

After spending decades defining Versace from inside the institution, the next chapter will show what fashion looks like when the only archive Donatella Versace has to answer to is her own.