Versace Ads: Unleash the Power of Bold Italian Fashion

Richard Avedon photographed Versace campaigns for nineteen years and never once let a background compete with a body.

Versace ads run from 1979 to 2026, produced in-house rather than through an agency of record, and they hold one set of rules across four creative directors.

This page covers the campaigns by name, with the photographer, year and market behind each one.

What you get:

• A campaign-by-campaign breakdown, from the Spring/Summer 1993 desert series to Spring/Summer 2026
• The composition, palette and typography decisions behind the Medusa lockup
• How the fragrance TV spots differ from the print work
• Six rules designers can lift straight from the pages

Versace advertising runs from 1979 to 2026, produced almost entirely in-house rather than through an agency of record. The work rests on three devices: group casting of supermodels, hard studio lighting against flat ground, and the Medusa emblem locked at the base of the frame.

This page covers the campaigns by name, with the photographer, year and market behind each one, plus the composition, palette and typography decisions that hold them together.

Versace Advertising at a Glance

Versace has advertised since 1979, working primarily with Richard Avedon (1979 to 1998) and Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott (2011 to 2024). Its best-known campaigns are Spring/Summer 1993, the Madonna campaign of 1995, and Versace Icons. The visual signature combines gold on black, the Greca border and the Medusa head.

Attribute	Value
First documented campaign	Richard Avedon for Gianni Versace, 1979
Lead image makers	Richard Avedon, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott
Best-known campaigns	Spring/Summer 1993, Madonna S/S 1995, Versace Icons 2023-2024
Primary media	Magazine double spreads, outdoor, cinema, campaign film, social
Visual signature	Medusa emblem, Greca key border, Barocco print, gold and black
Ownership	Prada Group, since 2 December 2025 (Capri Holdings, 2018 to 2025)

Capri Holdings sold the house to Prada for $1.375 billion in cash, per the company’s own 8-K filing. Versace posted roughly $1 billion in 2024 revenue, about 20% of Capri’s total.

Which Versace Ad Campaigns Are the Most Famous?

Six campaign bodies define Versace advertising: Avedon’s 1979 to 1998 run, the Spring/Summer 1993 desert series, Madonna’s Spring/Summer 1995 campaign by Steven Meisel, Bruce Weber’s Versace Jeans Couture work through the 1990s, Versace Icons from 2023, and the Spring/Summer 2026 campaign shot by three photographers.

Spring/Summer 1993, Shot November 1992

Richard Avedon photographed this campaign in New York over November 1992. Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss, Christy Turlington, Stephanie Seymour and Kristen McMenamy appear together on bleached desert ground.

Group choreography carries the layout. Bodies form a diagonal band across the spread, which pulls the eye left to right and lands it on the wordmark.

Gagosian exhibited 32 unique signed prints from the series at Paris Photo 2014. Avedon printed this set in color, which he rarely did.

Madonna, Spring/Summer 1995

Photographer: Steven Meisel.

Talent: Madonna, in her first of two Versace campaigns (she returned in 2005).

Copy device: tableau rather than portrait. One frame stages her as Sleeping Beauty on a flight of stairs, bitten apple in hand.

Meisel built the images around interior sets instead of seamless backdrops, which gave the pages depth Avedon’s studio work deliberately refused.

Versace Jeans Couture, 1994 to 1998

Bruce Weber shot the diffusion line through the mid-1990s, including the 1995 Helena Christensen and Alex Lundqvist ad and the Spring/Summer 1994 spread that ran in Vogue Hommes.

Weber’s frames sit outdoors in daylight. Grain replaces gloss, the palette drops toward denim blue and skin, and the Medusa shrinks to a small mark near the gutter.

Weber also shot the Versus lookbooks, including the 1997 edition with Jon Bon Jovi. He returned to the main line in 2016 and shot Gigi Hadid for a 2017 two-page ad.

Versace Icons, 2023 to 2024

Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott shot every phase of Icons under Donatella Versace’s creative direction, with Jacob K styling and Happy Massee on set design.

Anne Hathaway and Chris Lee fronted the 2023 chapter. Cillian Murphy joined for 2024 as the first men’s talent, with music by Fontaines D.C. on the film.

The Fall 2023 mainline campaign went fully monochrome, putting Gigi Hadid, Irina Shayk, Anok Yai and Liu Wen on a stark white set. Reaction on the forums was split, with several readers calling the compositions flat.

Versace Embodied and Spring/Summer 2026

Versace Embodied launched in September 2025 as Dario Vitale’s opening statement, and it barely showed product at all.

Chapter One gathered sketches by Collier Schorr, poetry by Eileen Myles, Camille Vivier’s photographs of the bronze Medusa at Via Gesu 12, and an archive dig through Steven Meisel.

The Spring/Summer 2026 campaign followed on 3 February 2026, shot by Steven Meisel, Frank Lebon and Tania Franco Klein working independently. Meisel arranged models from a high angle in layered tableaux that read as a direct answer to Avedon’s Fall 1982 Versace work.

It was Vitale’s first and last ready-to-wear campaign. Prada closed the acquisition on 2 December, and he left ten days later after eight months in the job.

Versace Fragrance Print Ads, 2005 to 2026

Fragrance runs on a separate creative track from the fashion line, with its own faces and a much tighter product crop.

Fragrance	Face	Visual device
Bright Crystal	Candice Swanepoel, later Lily James	Mirrored sets, refracted light, pink to gold gradient
Eros	Brian Shimansky, Channing Tatum	Greek mythology staging, blue and gold
Dylan Blue	Bella Hadid, Louis Baines	Coastal light, horizon line, cool blues
Dylan Purple	Iris Law	Saturated purple field, single figure

The bottle is always the focal point. Faces sit behind or beside it, never in front, which is the opposite of the fashion campaigns where product often reads second.

How Do Versace Print Ads Work Visually?

Versace print ads use centered or diagonal figure groups, hard directional lighting, a two-color ground plus black, and a bottom-anchored logo lockup. Copy is minimal or absent. The image carries the argument, and the wordmark confirms who made it.

Look at the ground first. Avedon’s Versace pages use a single flat tone behind the figures, so the eye has nowhere to rest except on the bodies and the garment.

That decision sets the order in which the page is read: silhouette, then face, then print, then logo. Nothing else competes.

The palette rarely runs past three values. Gold, black and one accent. Weber’s denim work substitutes blue and skin tone for gold, but the count holds.

Lighting does the work color usually does. High-key studio light against a mid-tone ground produces the tonal separation that makes a Barocco print legible at magazine scale, and it survives the drop to newsprint and outdoor.

Typography stays out of the way. The wordmark sits in Radiant RR Bold, a heavy sans with almost no stroke modulation, set in caps with loose letterspacing so it reads as a mark rather than a word.

Logo placement follows one rule across four decades. The Medusa emblem goes bottom-center or bottom-right, small, in the calmest part of the frame.

The Greca key border shows up as a frame device on accessory and fragrance pages, less on the fashion spreads. When it appears it doubles as a border that closes the composition and stops the eye leaving the page.

One thing worth flagging: Versace pages carry far less empty margin than most luxury advertising. Where Jil Sander or Prada let air do the work, Versace fills the frame edge to edge and lets tonal contrast create the separation instead.

How Do Versace TV Commercials Differ From Its Print Ads?

Versace TV spots run 15 to 30 seconds, center on one performer instead of a group, and lean on music licensing and effects work. Print sells silhouette and print. Film sells motion, sound and a single face, which is why the fragrance line dominates broadcast.

Bright Crystal, “Warp,” featuring Lily James. Gordon von Steiner directed. Platige Image, the BAFTA-winning studio, built the effects into a set made of mirrors, and their supervisor Bartosz Krasicki noted the team spent most of the schedule on concept art rather than the animated elements themselves.

Eros, “Archer,” featuring Channing Tatum. Fifteen seconds, scored with a Placebo track. The spot stages the fragrance around archery imagery pulled from the Eros myth, with the bottle held in frame for roughly a third of the runtime.

Dylan Blue, “Upside Down,” featuring Bella Hadid and Louis Baines. Two figures lie by the ocean while the horizon rotates around them. The camera never cuts to product until the final beat.

Versace Icons 2024 film. Cillian Murphy and Anne Hathaway, shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Murphy has said he swapped image references with Donatella Versace directly and picked the Fontaines D.C. track himself.

The fashion line runs campaign films rather than commercials. They post to YouTube and Instagram, not broadcast, and they read as moving contact sheets rather than narrative spots.

How Has Versace Advertising Evolved Since 1979?

Versace advertising moved through four phases: Avedon studio glamour from 1979, supermodel and celebrity casting through the 1990s, celebrity-ambassador polish under Capri Holdings from 2018, and a return to authored photography under Dario Vitale in 2025.

Period	Strategic shift	Representative campaign
1979 to 1992	Studio portraiture, flat ground, product-forward	Avedon for Gianni Versace
1993 to 1998	Supermodel groups and pop celebrity	S/S 1993, Madonna S/S 1995
1999 to 2017	Single-face glamour, fragrance expansion	Bright Crystal, Eros, Lady Gaga 2014
2018 to 2024	Actor ambassadors, uniform studio white	Versace Icons
2025 to 2026	Multi-author imagery, art commissions	Versace Embodied, S/S 2026

The 1993 logo redesign is the hinge. The Medusa head entered the mark that year, and every campaign since has had a fixed emblem to place rather than a wordmark to compose around.

The 1997 revision dropped “Gianni” and arched the caps beneath the emblem. In 2008 the wordmark was enlarged and set horizontally, which is the lockup still running in printed advertising today.

One outside event shaped the brand’s image strategy more than any campaign. On 24 February 2000, searches for Jennifer Lopez in the green jungle-print dress became the most popular query Google had recorded, and Google credits that spike with prompting Image Search, which launched 12 July 2001.

Versace revived the print for Spring/Summer 2020 and closed the Milan show with Lopez in an updated version, cued by a live Google Assistant search. Rhode recreated a 1990s Avedon Versace group shot for its own lip campaign, and Donatella Versace shared it publicly.

Which Agencies Created Versace Advertising?

Versace has run creative in-house since 1978. No external agency of record holds the account. Campaigns are directed by the house creative director and executed by commissioned photographers, stylists, casting directors and set designers, which is why credits list names rather than shops.

Richard Avedon photographed Versace campaigns from 1979 to 1998, under Gianni Versace’s direction. Donatella Versace has described working overnight on Avedon’s sets, with the photographer discarding three days of material and restarting.

Steven Meisel photographed the Madonna campaign for Spring/Summer 1995 and returned in 2026 for the Spring/Summer campaign under Dario Vitale.

Bruce Weber photographed Versace Jeans Couture and the Versus lookbooks through the 1990s, then returned to the main line in 2016.

Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott photographed Versace mainline campaigns from 2011 through Icons in 2024, with Jacob K as stylist, Piergiorgio Del Moro casting, and Happy Massee building the sets.

Creative direction changed hands twice in 2025. Donatella Versace stepped down in March after 27 years. Dario Vitale held the role from 1 April to 12 December, and Lorenzo Bertelli now chairs the house under Prada Group.

Avedon shot for Dior, Chanel and Calvin Klein advertising across the same decades, and Abrams collected more than 300 of his commercial images in the 2019 book Avedon Advertising.

What Can Designers Learn From Versace Ads?

Versace advertising offers five transferable rules: flatten the background, cap the palette, anchor the mark, let the body build the composition, and cut the copy. Each one shows up consistently across 47 years and four creative directors.

• Flatten the ground so the silhouette does the separating, not the background
• Cap the working palette at two colors plus black
• Anchor the mark in the calmest zone of the frame and keep it small
• Build the composition from bodies and gesture, not from a column structure
• Set the wordmark at one weight and let spacing carry the reading order
• Cut the copy line entirely when the image already states the position

The last one is harder than it sounds. Most brand teams want a line because a line feels like a message, and Versace has proven for four decades that an image plus a mark is a message.

The counterexample is instructive too. The uniform white-studio approach of 2023 drew criticism for producing compositions that looked assembled rather than staged, which suggests the flat ground only works when the point of focus is decided before the shoot, not after.

How Do Versace Ads Compare to Gucci and Prada Ads?

Versace advertising uses the body as the compositional unit. Gucci builds around character and archive reference. Prada commissions artists and lets concept lead. The three houses sit in the same city and the same price bracket, and their pages look nothing alike.

House	Compositional unit	Recent authorship
Versace	Body, gesture, group	Meisel, Lebon, Franco Klein (2026)
Gucci	Character portrait, look-by-look	Demna, self-shot (2026)
Prada	Concept and art commission	Anne Collier, Oliver Hadlee Pearch (2026)

Gucci advertising under Demna went almost catalogue. Generation Gucci ran 84 images, one per look, all shot by Demna himself, which collapses the gap between campaign and lookbook.

Catherine Opie shot 42 portraits for the Fall 2025 Gucci Portrait Series against monochrome backdrops. Same flat-ground instinct as Versace, opposite intent: Opie holds on the face, Versace holds on the silhouette.

Prada campaigns keep the product small and the idea large. The Spring/Summer 2026 campaign paired artist Anne Collier with photographer Oliver Hadlee Pearch on a self-referential concept about images of images.

Dolce and Gabbana runs the sharpest contrast. Ferdinando Scianna’s 1987 black-and-white series with Marpessa Hennink set a documentary Sicily template the house still shoots against, and Domenico Dolce photographed the Spring 2013 campaign himself.

Avedon worked across the fence. He shot Dior advertising in 1982 with Andy Warhol and Kelly Le Brock in frame, and those pages carry an editorial looseness his Versace work never allows.

What Makes Versace Advertising Work?

Versace advertising works because the constraint set never moved. Flat ground, capped palette, small mark, body-led composition. Four creative directors and a dozen photographers have worked inside those four rules since 1979, which is why a 1993 spread and a 2026 spread read as the same house without repeating a single frame.

The house also treats the photographer as author rather than supplier. Commissioning three photographers for one season, as it did for Spring/Summer 2026, only works when the underlying identity system is strong enough to survive three points of view.

That is the transferable part. Fix the rules, then hire people who will push against them.

FAQ on Versace Ads

Who are Versace’s current brand ambassadors?

Anne Hathaway has fronted Versace Icons since 2023. Cillian Murphy joined in 2024 as the debut men’s talent, Bai Jingting handles fragrance globally, and Ningning, Hyunjin and Rosy Zhao cover Asian markets.

Has Versace ever run a Super Bowl ad?

No. A 30-second slot at Super Bowl LX cost roughly $8 million, per Forbes, and European luxury houses have skipped the format almost entirely. Mass reach contradicts the scarcity a house like Versace sells.

Where can you watch old Versace commercials?

Versace keeps an Advertising Campaigns index on versace.com under Stories. iSpot.tv catalogues the fragrance TV spots with air dates and music credits, and Models.com lists full campaign credits per season.

What typeface does the Versace wordmark use?

The current wordmark runs in Radiant RR Bold, a heavy grotesque with squared terminals. Earlier lockups used a narrow sans closer to Sophi Sophi Regular. Treat it as protected brand lettering, not a licensable font.

How much does Versace spend on advertising?

Versace never reported it separately. Capri Holdings disclosed marketing costs at group level only, and Prada Group has not broken the brand out since December 2025. Versace posted roughly $1 billion in 2024 revenue.

Does Versace still advertise in print magazines?

Yes. Business Research Insights valued the fashion magazine market at $1.24 billion for 2024, and Excellent Publicity recorded 21% growth in print ad volume from luxury and premium apparel brands that year.

Which supermodels appeared in 1990s Versace ads?

Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Kate Moss, Stephanie Seymour, Kristen McMenamy and Shalom Harlow appear across the Avedon campaigns. Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and Nadja Auermann front the group shot Rhode recreated in 2025.

Why does the Medusa appear in nearly every Versace ad?

Gianni Versace chose the Medusa head for its double reading of beauty and danger, and it entered the logo in 1993. The borrowed mythological symbol gives every layout one fixed anchor point.

What is the Greca border in Versace advertising?

The Greca is the Greek key motif, a squared meander built from repeating angular units. It runs as a frame on fragrance and accessory pages, and as hardware on the Greca Goddess bag line.

Where can you buy original Versace magazine tearsheets?

eBay carries the widest supply, including Bruce Weber’s 1990 Amalia Vairelli page and Versace Jeans Couture spreads from 1998. Check that the seller states the source magazine and issue date before buying.

Conclusion

Versace ads reward close reading more than most luxury advertising, because the decisions sit visible on the page instead of buried in a brief.

Pull any tearsheet from the archive and the same skeleton turns up. Flat ground, capped palette, a Barocco print carrying the color, the Greca border closing the frame.

Steven Meisel staged that grammar one way in 1995. Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott staged it another way in 2023. Neither broke it.

Supermodel casting gave way to actor signings, and Donatella Versace handed the direction on. The art direction rules held through all of it.

Study the double-page spreads before the campaign films. Print is where the thinking shows.