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Versace
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Versace is an Italian luxury fashion house with roots in Reggio Calabria, where Gianni Versace was born on December 2, 1946. Growing up watching his mother work as a dressmaker, Gianni moved to Milan in 1972 and spent several years working for Italian ateliers including Genny, Complice, and Callaghan before founding his own label. In 1978, he launched Gianni Versace Donna and opened the first boutique on Via della Spiga in Milan, with his brother Santo serving as president and his sister Donatella as vice-president.
The house built its visual identity around opulence and provocation: vivid colors, baroque prints, body-conscious silhouettes, and a Medusa head logo that Gianni drew from his southern Italian heritage in ancient Magna Graecia. In 1982, he invented Oroton, a lightweight metal mesh fabric that became one of the house's signature materials. That same year the brand expanded into jewellery and homeware, designing luxury furnishings, china, and textiles, a diversification that would come to define how Versace was encountered far beyond the runway.
Gianni also pioneered celebrity dressing as a marketing strategy, building relationships with supermodels and entertainers at a time when haute couture still dominated fashion's prestige hierarchy. The house became as associated with the red carpet as with its collections. When Gianni was murdered outside his Miami mansion on July 15, 1997, the brand passed to his family: Donatella became creative director, and Allegra Versace Beck, Gianni's niece, inherited his majority stake.
Donatella reoriented the house around her own sensibility while preserving its core visual language. She staged the first Versace Atelier haute couture show in Paris in 1998, less than a year after her brother's death. Under her direction, the brand navigated several decades of reinvention and financial pressure. In 2018, Capri Holdings, the American group behind Michael Kors, acquired Versace for approximately 2.1 billion US dollars. In 2025, Donatella stepped down as chief creative officer after nearly three decades in the role.
On the Nordic auction market, Versace appears across 93 lots spanning a wide range of product categories, wristwatches, clothing, bags, accessories, and porcelain. The house's home collection, which Gianni launched in the 1980s, accounts for a portion of that range. Wristwatches have reached the highest individual prices, with examples selling for 10,500 SEK and 10,400 SEK, while clothing and accessories typically sell in the 6,000-8,000 SEK range. Leading houses by volume include Helsingborgs Auktionskammare, Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, and Goteborgs Auktionsverk.