With a new independent venture alongside Revolve, Donatella Versace is returning to creative direction on entirely new terms. After nearly three decades spent shaping and preserving the Versace legacy, she now faces something she has rarely had before: a blank page.
Donatella Versace is returning to creative direction. A year and a half after stepping down as Chief Creative Officer of Versace, the designer has announced a new joint venture with Revolve Group, the California-based digital retailer with a particularly strong following among Millennials and Gen Z. The as-yet-unnamed project will establish a new independent business spanning beauty and fashion, with Donatella serving as Chief Creative Officer.
The venture will make its debut in beauty, while the first products and the brand’s name will be unveiled in the coming months. The initial launch will focus on the United States, Latin America, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. At the heart of the project will be Donatella’s personal creative vision, supported by Revolve’s digital and commercial infrastructure.
The project also stems from Donatella’s desire to establish a more direct and personal dialogue with younger generations, reflecting her longstanding interest in the ways fashion, music, film and art intersect and influence one another. It is precisely this opportunity to move within a new creative space that makes the announcement more than simply a return to creative direction.
To fully understand what this new project represents, however, it is worth looking back at a career in which Donatella Versace has played a major role in contemporary fashion, while almost always working within a creative universe that existed before her.
The Versace Legacy
When Donatella took over the creative direction of Versace in 1997, following the death of her brother Gianni, she inherited far more than a company. She inherited one of the most recognisable visual languages in Italian fashion.
Gianni had built an entire universe around Versace, defined by sensuality, excess, baroque prints, gold and classical mythology. Donatella therefore found herself facing a particularly complex challenge, one that creative directors at historic fashion houses continue to confront today. On the one hand, there is the responsibility to preserve a brand’s identity; on the other, the need to prevent it from becoming frozen in its own past.
Over the course of the following three decades, she gradually succeeded in transforming that legacy into something personal. Her Versace remained sexy, flamboyant and instantly recognisable, but it also became deeply connected to the language of contemporary celebrity culture. Musicians, actresses, models and pop stars were not simply ambassadors; they became an integral part of the house’s universe.
It was an instinct Donatella demonstrated long before the relationship between fashion, celebrity and virality became central to the industry as a whole.
One need only think of one of the most famous dresses in recent pop culture history: the jungle dress worn by Jennifer Lopez at the 2000 Grammy Awards. It was a moment in which fashion, celebrity and digital culture converged in an almost prophetic way.
However, behind every collection, there was still Versace. That’s why the new project takes on a different significance.
Being the creative director of a historic fashion house inevitably means working within a pre-existing vocabulary. In Donatella’s case, that relationship was even more complex because the vocabulary had been created by her brother. For almost three decades, Donatella was therefore both designer and custodian.
When she stepped down as the house’s Chief Creative Officer in March 2025 and assumed the role of Chief Brand Ambassador, it seemed as though a chapter that had begun in 1997 had definitively come to an end.
We now know that it was not the end of her creative career, but the beginning of a new phase.
Donatella Versace Faces a Blank Page
The partnership with Revolve offers Donatella the opportunity to build an identity without having to begin with an archive. There is something almost paradoxical about it. At 71, after one of the most recognisable careers in contemporary fashion, Donatella Versace finds herself in a position more commonly associated with an emerging designer: defining a creative universe from scratch.
And this is perhaps the most interesting question raised by the announcement: who is Donatella Versace when she is not designing Versace?
Over the years, Donatella herself has become one of the house’s most recognisable symbols. The platinum hair, the black dresses, the towering heels: her personal image has become almost as integral to the Versace universe as the creations bearing the family name. The new project could therefore reveal, perhaps for the first time with real clarity, which elements of that universe belonged to the brand and which truly belonged to her.
Donatella has chosen Revolve, a company born in the digital space and built around a younger audience, e-commerce and the close relationship between fashion, influencers and online culture. It is an ecosystem very different from that of the major European fashion houses, but not necessarily far removed from the way Donatella has always understood fashion.
Her career has consistently demonstrated a particular sensitivity to what happens beyond the runway. Music, film, celebrity and popular culture have never simply been communication tools for Versace, but they have been part of its language.
The decision to begin with beauty rather than a traditional ready-to-wear collection also suggests that the ambition may extend beyond creating a new fashion house in the conventional sense. Fashion, beauty, entertainment and culture could all coexist within the same universe.
In this new beginning, we may find the sensuality, glamour and excess that we immediately associate with her name. Or we may discover an entirely different side of her aesthetic. We will have to wait for the first products to find out.
But after almost three decades spent defining what Versace could become after Gianni, the question now is much simpler (and perhaps, for that very reason, much more interesting):
What does Donatella want to be when she no longer has to be Versace?