Versace Jeans Crocodile Embossed Top Handle Trapeze Shoulder Bag / Handbag

Best known for creating groundbreaking fashion designs from the 1950s onward, Pierre Cardin enjoyed great success in other design fields, most notably furniture. Cardin’s chairs, cabinets, tables and other pieces share many of the keynotes of his clothing designs. They are simple, geometric, elegant and cool.

Cardin was born in a village near Venice, Italy, and raised in central France. Always interested in fashion, he left home at age 17 to train with a Vichy tailor. After the end of World War II, Cardin moved to Paris and worked for a succession of couture houses, before taking a job with Christian Dior in 1946. Cardin went solo in 1950, and quickly won attention for his novel style.

Unlike Dior’s famous New Look, Cardin’s clothes de-emphasized a woman’s curves; his breakthrough pieces like the Bubble dress had, instead, a sculptural quality. In the following decade, Cardin introduced bright tunic dresses and shifts, marketed as the Space Age look and accessorized with vinyl hats and visors.

In the 1970s Cardin expanded his design work into furniture, jewelry and automobiles. (Later, licensing agreements would put Cardin’s name on goods ranging from perfume to sunglasses.) Cardin’s furniture pieces — inspired, perhaps, by the rediscovery of Art Deco design in that decade — feature simple, symmetrical forms, lacquer and figured veneer finishes, and accents in metals such as aluminum and brass.

Whether you are looking for a vintage cocktail dress or a chest of drawers to keep it in, as you will see on 1stDibs, Pierre Cardin offers an option in either that is timelessly chic.

Subversive, maximalist and unabashedly seductive, Gianni Versace’s (1946–97) designs infused high fashion with an entirely new ethos. “I don’t believe in good taste,” the legendary Italian couturier once explained. Instead, he had a sexy good time with fashion — as he did with life.

Today, vintage Versace clothing, handbags and other accessories look astonishingly fresh and freshly relevant. The designer debuted his Atelier Versace line — which was part of his first haute couture collection — in 1989. 

More than any designer before him, Versace mined celebrity, music and Pop art for inspiration. In fact, the New York Times noted in 1997 that the fashion industry “is now driven by contemporary culture because Mr. Versace made it that way.”

Insiders consider his 1991/1992 Autumn/Winter runway show — which featured supermodels Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista lip-synching George Michael’s “Freedom! '90” — the moment when the two worlds of fashion and pop culture became one, changing both forever.

Versace was born in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. His mother was a successful dressmaker who employed more than 40 seamstresses. As a child, little Gianni marveled at her workshop, which would become a university of sorts, where he learned the exceptional construction techniques that were at the foundation of his creative expression.

In 1972, at age 25, Versace moved to Milan to work in fashion. He launched his first collection — and his label — in 1978, with his older brother Santo managing the business concerns. Soon, sister Donatella, whom Gianni dressed and took to discos when she was still a child, joined the family venture, where she had a creative role and managed enormously popular ready-to-wear lines such as Versus.

Vintage Versace — and 1989's Gianni Versace Couture — has become catnip for modern fashion enthusiasts who seek out the now-iconic house codes that originated in the designs of the 1980s and 1990s. His glamorous and seductive apparel — the clingy skirts and slender, strappy party dresses, as well as the erotic magazine ads that publicized them — looms large, but Versace’s art and historical influences were also vast.

Versace was an art collector, and he took on commissions to create costumes for theatrical performances during the 1980s and spoke of looking to numerous cultures for inspiration. This adventurous spirit of design resulted in his creating jewel-toned prints rooted in Grecian motifs, Etruscan symbols, the Italian Baroque and Andy Warholʼs Marilyn Monroe. There were slinky dresses in Oroton, his patented chain-mail textile that draped like satin, and leather bondage ensembles. Sex sold, for both women and men. Wrote the late curator Richard Martin, “[Versace] became the standard-bearer of gay men’s fashion because he eschewed decorum and designed for desire.”

Following Versace’s tragic murder in 1997, Donatella took over the role of artistic director and continued to evolve the house codes with a twist of her feminine and feminist perspective. Today, Santo Versace is chief executive officer of Versace and Donatella is its chief creative officer.

Browse an extraordinary collection of vintage Atelier Versace dresses, evening gowns and more on 1stDibs.