Donatella Versace

Donatella Versace is the Italian designer who ran creative direction at Versace from 1997 to 2025, and in lingerie history she matters for two things: the corsetry and bondage details that the house put on the runway as outerwear, and the full Versace underwear line she launched for spring 2013. Born in 1955 in Reggio Calabria, she worked beside her brother Gianni for almost twenty years before taking over the house after his death.

Vice president and stylist, 1978 to 1997

Donatella joined her brother's company as vice president in 1978. Her work there was styling, building the brand's image and advertising, and designing accessories, shoes and handbags. In 1989 Gianni gave her the Versus diffusion line to run.

Gianni Versace's clothes were openly about the body, and Wikipedia sums up his aesthetic as one that "combined luxurious classicism with overt sexuality". That approach is the background to everything Donatella later did with underwear.

The Miss S&M collection, Fall/Winter 1992

The clearest lingerie moment in the house's history came from Gianni's Fall/Winter 1992 collection, known as "Miss S&M". It took the vocabulary of fetish wear and of the corset, harness straps and corsetry, and sent it down the runway as clothes to be seen. Donatella wore the collection's leather bondage dress, and L'Officiel Monaco wrote in 2025 that the dress became tied to her public image.

The collection is a textbook case of underwear-as-outerwear in the early 1990s: garments that once sat under clothes, worn as the clothes themselves. Pieces from it, including silk bondage corset tops, now turn up at auction and on vintage dealers such as 1stDibs, priced as collector's items rather than clothes. For anyone tracing the corset bra back to the catwalk, Miss S&M is one of the reference points.

Creative director after 1997

Gianni Versace was murdered in Miami Beach on July 15, 1997, and Donatella became the house's creative director. She showed her first haute couture collection at the Ritz in Paris on July 18, 1998. Her best-known dress of the period, the green gown Jennifer Lopez wore to the 2000 Grammy Awards, worked on the same principle as Miss S&M: clothing that shows the body rather than hides it.

Versace Underwear, spring 2013

The runway had borrowed from lingerie for two decades before the house sold underwear as a complete collection. In November 2012 the trade paper Drapers reported that Versace would launch full underwear and beachwear collections for spring 2013, for both women and men, using the Medusa head logo and the house's signature prints. Drapers printed her comment: "I am thrilled to be offering Versace Underwear and Versace Beachwear as complete collections."

The line is still part of the business. Versace's own site sells women's bras, bralettes, briefs and sports bras in its underwear and beachwear category, many of them carrying the Medusa head. Compared with the 1992 runway, the commercial line is plain: a bralette with a logo band is a long way from a leather harness. But it turned an attitude the house had worn on the catwalk into a product sold every season.

Handing over in 2025

In March 2025 Donatella announced that she would step down after nearly 28 years at the head of design. Dario Vitale, formerly design director at Miu Miu, took over creative direction that summer, and Donatella remains with the company as chief brand ambassador.

Last updated October 7, 2026