Versace’s Global Reign: How a Gilded Italian Label Became the World’s Favorite Status Receipt

Versace, or: How a Dead Italian Playboy Became the Patron Saint of Post-Soviet Oligarchs
By A Correspondent Who Once Bought a Knock-Off Belt in Istanbul and Still Has Nightmares

The House of Versace began, as all great luxury brands do, with a family melodrama: a gifted tailor from Calabria, a fatal dose of ambition, and the 1978 decision to dress the newly-minted super-rich like they were starring in their own private disco massacre. Four decades later, the brand has transcended mere couture to become a planetary status symbol—equal parts art, armor, and money-laundering receipt—worn from the VIP rope line in Dubai to the bulletproof Range Rover idling outside a Kyiv courthouse. In other words, Versace isn’t clothing; it’s a wearable offshore account.

From a global vantage point, the Medusa head logo is less a fashion motif and more a geopolitical semaphore. Flash it in Beijing and you signal “my father’s coal mine is still open”; flash it in Lagos and you whisper “yes, those treasury funds were well spent.” The pattern is consistent: wherever capital flight meets Instagram, Versace blooms like a lurid orchid in a cracked greenhouse. One recent study by a European anti-corruption NGO (motto: “Counting Yachts So You Don’t Have To”) found that 12 percent of all Versace menswear purchases above €5,000 were made within 48 hours of a politically exposed person’s unexplained wealth order. Coincidence, surely—just as it is surely coincidence that the same study’s footnotes cite three separate private jets nicknamed “Barocco One,” “Barocco Two,” and “Barocco Three.”

The brand’s international expansion mirrors every empire’s playbook: arrive, dazzle, then quietly rewrite local taste. In South Korea, Versace’s Baroque print has been re-engineered to fit K-pop’s aesthetic of sugar-rush maximalism; in Brazil, the same print is stretched across bullet-proof vests favored by funk artists who sing about police helicopters. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the label’s Ramadan capsule collections—delivered in velvet boxes that look suspiciously like caviar tins—sell out in minutes, proving that piety and peacocking are not mutually exclusive. One Riyadh boutique manager confided, between sips of a €70 bottle of water, that abaya-friendly Versace lining is “the fastest-moving fabric we’ve seen since oil futures.”

Of course, no international empire is complete without a succession crisis. When Michael Kors Holdings (now Capri Holdings, because nothing says luxury like a corporate rebrand named after a budget cigarette) bought Versace for €1.83 billion in 2018, the fashion press reacted as though Medusa herself had been sold to a hedge fund. Pundits predicted “American mall-ification,” a horror scenario in which the Gorgon would appear on polyester tote bags next to Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. Yet three years on, the marriage endures, sustained by the same principle that keeps Swiss banks neutral: money. Capri’s latest quarterly report credits “continued strength in Asia-Pacific” for offsetting European sluggishness—diplomatic code for “Chinese teenagers buying €900 slides faster than we can mint them.”

The broader significance? Versace is the canary in globalization’s coal mine, except the canary is wearing gold lamé and the mine is on fire. Each collection is a quarterly referendum on how much vulgarity the newly rich can stomach before indigestion sets in. When Donatella sent gold-chain mail down the Milan runway last February, TikTok dubbed it “Ukraine-war chic,” because nothing says solidarity like a $3,000 minidress that clinks like spent shell casings. Yet the irony is double-edged: many of those same memes were posted from bomb shelters where the only Versace in sight was the knock-off scarf wrapped around a babushka’s head. Luxury, meet reality; reality, please leave your muddy boots at the door.

In the end, Versace survives not despite the world’s squalor but because of it. The more precarious the planet becomes, the more desperately humans cling to symbols of invincibility. And so the Medusa head keeps turning new men to stone—only now they do it willingly, tapping “Add to Cart” while their economies convulse. The brand’s next act, insiders whisper, involves NFTs of the Baroque print that self-destruct if your credit score drops. Call it couture for the end times: when everything else evaporates, at least your bankruptcy will be fabulous.