Why The Famed Logo Of Versace Is Turning Heads!

Inspired by an ancient ruin, medusas head is among the strangest marks in fashion.

- Robert Klara

Contemporary marketing wisdom holds that the best brand logos are clever, clean and easy to recognize— simplicity working all the better to serve as instant visual cue to a brand’s identity. How, then, to explain the logo that stomps on these articles of branding faith—or, in this case, turns them to stone?

When Michael Kors announced last week that it would pay $2 billion to acquire Versace, fashion mavens and financial hawks fell to picking apart not just the rationale of the deal, but the consequences for the 40-year-old Italian fashion brand. And while many things may change for the Milan-based label, one piece of the company is bound to remain as immutable and omnipresent as it’s always been: that head.

You know the one. It’s the Gorgon, better known as Medusa: the lady whose hideous face, circumscribed by a Greek fretwork border, fixes her deadly stare at all comers, petrifying them with the snakes she has instead of hair. Yeah, that logo. Whoever thought such a complicated and thematically bizarre emblem would be a good idea? Well, Gianni Versace did. But why he did, and why it works, remains something of a mystery.