An audience of over 600 saw that first collection, which was christened Geometrissimo. Morris characterised the collection as ‘clothes with a Japanese flavour … far freer than those shown by the established houses’. This was praise indeed, making reference to the wave of Japanese designers including Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto who had conquered Paris in the early part of the decade with their softer, sculptural lines and abstract shaping. As Dolce told Vogue in 2005, ‘Power-dressing dominated the scene. We wanted to go ahead of the trend and create something new, linear and stretchy.’ The collection was notable for its multifunctionality, or as Vogue Italia coined it upon later reflection, pluriportabilità. Unpadded, slinky clothing could be worn either way up, or with two holes through which to place a head, emphasising the sensual slouch of a garment, and giving a taste of the body-focused direction of their future design.
Stretchy materials and linear, body-focused outlines continued to feature in Dolce & Gabbana designs: here Dewey Nicks pictures a diamanté-trimmed powder-blue party dress and matching sandals in 1995.
As with Donna, Donna, Dolce & Gabbana’s first ever collection received positive reviews. And, as before, the designers found a manufacturer that initially agreed to produce it for retailers – but which then mysteriously reneged on that agreement. The two twenty-somethings searched frantically for a substitute factory, but failed and sent a letter cancelling their fabric order. In high dudgeon they retired to Polizzi Generosa, the small Sicilian town in which Dolce was born and raised, to spend Christmas with his family. There they found salvation. Dolce’s parents ran a tailoring and haberdashery business, which in the 1970s his father had grown into a small menswear factory. It was his brother-in-law, Dolce later recalled, who made the crucial suggestion: ‘Why doesn’t the family try to make your clothes?’ A serendipitous postal strike meant that the letter cancelling their fabric order hadn’t yet reached its destination. They were on.
Geometrissimo was followed up by a collection that made a virtue of Dolce & Gabbana’s poverty. Real Women included outerwear made of cotton jersey and denim, which the designers rubbed with pumice stones to achieve a distressed, worn look. Gabbana later recalled: ‘We didn’t even have money to buy shoes or accessories. So I asked my friends to borrow things, from Manolo Blahnik, Moschino, Ferré, so it would be like how a woman uses things from lots of designers in ordinary life. I bought clocks in vintage shops to make jewellery. Some necklaces were made from ceramic equipment that’s used on electricity poles.’ In what was their first solo show, the collection was modelled by friends and volunteers on a catwalk separated from backstage by the designers’ own bedsheets.
It was their third collection, spring/summer 1987’s Trasformismo, that first gave observers a real signal that Dolce & Gabbana might be a label on the rise. The buyers and editors in the audience for the designers’ 9am show (held in their tiny, fifth floor showroom) saw pluriportabilità dresses and t-shirts in a range of innovative new fabrics. These included a stretch crêpe developed by Dolce & Gabbana in collaboration with a small factory in Como and a transparent double organza jersey. Velcro panels allowed the garments to be worn in multiple ways, and everything was reversible and re-shapable. It was with Trasformismo that Dolce & Gabbana really captured Vogue. First embraced, naturally, by their home edition, the pair featured in a short profile with a portrait by Renato Grignaschi in the January 1987 issue of Vogue Italia. The magazine praised the 105-piece collection of garments that were ‘different from each other but linked to one another, with, at its core, a corollary of simple pieces to combine with them: T-shirts, jackets, skirts’. A collection, it agreed, for ‘real women’. The collection also represented Dolce & Gabbana’s first commercial success internationally, as it was bought by Browns in London (who had ignited John Galliano’s career and brought Comme des Garçons and Calvin Klein to London) and Charivari in New York, also known for its introduction of emerging Italian and Japanese talents.
A 24-year-old Stefano Gabbana and a 28-year-old Domenico Dolce pose for a portrait by Michel Arnaud as Vogue celebrates their being at the forefront of young Milanese fashion talent at the autumn/ winter 1987 collections. Citing them as key players in ‘Milan’s feminine renaissance’, Dolce & Gabbana are praised for their ‘soft lines and mellifluous palette’.
The autumn/winter 1987 collection brought Dolce & Gabbana to the pages of British Vogue, which explained the label’s emergence in the September issue within a context of new Italian romance and sensuality, spearheaded by the likes of Romeo Gigli. The report praised the pair’s agent- and assistant-free approach to design, their unique fabric experiments and a mastery of colour, pairing various subdued earthy colours with black. The ‘real woman’ was again cited as a focus for the pair, who were quoted as saying ‘We want to design for the softer more feminine woman, with the looks of actress Anna Magnani’.
This was a watershed collection for another reason. Dolce, who had been in creative thrall to the minimalism of Japanese design, was now persuaded by Gabbana to embrace his roots. Thus the collection, entitled La Sicilia and later described by Dolce as ‘romantico but never aggressivo’, gently incorporated key themes drawn from the island of his birth, most particularly the flash of white shirt worn under a sensuous but austere black dress. It took Gabbana’s outsider’s eye to realise the rich potential of Sicilian iconography, and Dolce’s intimate knowledge to express it fully.
Yasmin Le Bon smoulders in several layers of texture by Dolce & Gabbana, shot by Hans Feurer in 1988. The sensuality of the label was already established, and here a relatively conservative skirt length and a chiffon shirt exposing just a slight triangle of torso both help to fashion a wholly seductive ensemble.
To advertise the collection, the designers recruited the Sicilian reportage photographer Ferdinando Scianna. Marpessa Hennink, the Dutch-Surinamese model, agreed to model for free. Together the four of them set off around Sicily to shoot. ‘He used just one camera and we shot for two or three days going off in a car’, Gabbana later recalled, ‘and we used the headlights for the light source’. Scianna said of the shoot: ‘Through their clothes and Marpessa who wore them I attempted to take a journey with the memory of my Sicilian childhood.’ The resulting pictures were beautiful evocations of Sicily’s rough romance in which Marpessa, unmade-up, hair loosely back, and shot in black and white, looked simultaneously raw and ravishing.
It was next season, spring/summer 1988, that won Dolce & Gabbana its first full editorial page in Vogue. Shot by Hans Feurer, the black jacket, tea rose-coloured half-buttoned shirt and loosely abundant layered black chiffon skirt modelled by Yasmin Le Bon was a neat encapsulation of a collection that took the Sicilian theme from the season before and ran with it. Entitled Il Gattopardo, the collection drew inspiration from Italian Neorealist director Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), an adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s poignant account of Sicilian aristocracy’s decline. The Leopard’s sumptuous nostalgia has become a cornerstone reference for Dolce & Gabbana, and in this collection they contrasted baroque full skirts with their first ever corsetry-as-outwear looks as well as the incorporation of brocade and seemingly priestly (but backless) white shirts.
As if having found the soul with which to underpin their technical skill and perfected the nuances of a working relationship, for the next two seasons the designers continued to refine their Sicilian-infused metier. They incorporated masculine tailoring for the first time in the autumn/winter 1988 Baroque-Neorealism collection, which was again heavily influenced by Visconti. And in spring/summer 1989 they presented their first corset dress and the first pieces made entirely in crochet. Dolce later said, ‘by the end of this season, the whole world had a clear idea of what Dolce & Gabbana [was] about’. Furthermore, that idea was making a profound impression. As Liz Tilberis, editor in chief of Vogue between 1987 and 1992, wrote of Dolce & Gabbana: ‘It’s the first show on the schedule and always has a buzz about it, like the beginning of a term. The remarkable thing is, 500 collections later at the end of term you always remember what their show was like – which is one very good indicant of the mark they are making on the fashion consciousness.’
A very feminine expression of Dolce & Gabbana’s masculine tailoring: Nadja Auermann poses in a marshmallow-pink wool three-piece suit from the spring/summer 1992 La Dolce Vita collection. The supermodel is even provided with a carriage for a Chinese Crested dog in the form of the designers’ gilt, bead and cameo-laden evening bag. Photograph by Eric Boman.
‘Style is personality. It’s the ability to look at things beyond fashion and the self-confidence to transform even the simplest thing into something special.’
DOLCE & GABBANA
By the start of the 1990s, Dolce & Gabbana had established a foothold in Milan’s fiercely competitive fashion system, and made a lasting impression on fashion internationally. They would start the decade with the launch of a menswear line, extending their reach into new boutiques and wardrobes as well as the ‘Men in Vogue’ pages of the magazine. The label was given its first British Vogue cover in August 1992. Shortly after the release of Thelma & Louise, Peggy Sirota pictured the film’s co-star Geena Davis, arms flung out in a black lace body and perched upon a leopard-print pouffe. Dolce & Gabbana had now captured both Vogue and Hollywood, a potent combination.
Dolce & Gabbana’s ascent fitted perfectly into the 1990s’ renewed love affair between fashion and Hollywood. With more and more stars featuring on the front of Vogue, Dolce & Gabbana’s brand of flattering, feminine and forthright fashion became the preferred choice. Here Geena Davis appears on the cover of the August 1992 issue in a photograph by Peggy Sirota.
Meanwhile, Dolce and Gabbana were rapidly building their business by opening stand-alone stores. By 1992 they had two in Milan, and one each in Tokyo and Hong Kong, as well as 350 wholesale accounts and a turnover of over $62 million, all the while securing lucrative sideline deals that reflected how fast their brand – and recognition of it – had grown. In 1992 Vogue noted the debut fragrance (called simply ‘Dolce & Gabbana’), and later spoke to Dolce about the challenges – and rewards – of diversifying into perfume. He said: ‘To get a scent that lasts is every designer’s dream. It’s not just that your business enters another sphere, but that you have the financial flexibility to be freer in your fashion collections.’
‘We think of how a woman will feel in our dresses. Will she feel beautiful? Will she feel sexy?’
DOLCE & GABBANA
In autumn 1993, Dolce and Gabbana signed a six-year partnership deal with manufacturer Ittierre S.p.A. to produce a diffusion line named D&G. The designers were already designing a second collection under contract to Complice (a successful and widely-distributed label owned by Italian manufacturing giant Genny), but D&G quickly eclipsed it and the Complice arrangement ended in 1994. Although this initialled second offering (a combination of sportswear and interpretations of vintage clothing for which the designers had noticed a renewed fervour among the youngsters of grunge) was featured far less often than the main line within the pages of Vogue, it gave the company a financial stability on which to push on for yet more growth, as well as a hugely powerful marketing tool in the form of its logo in distinctive sans-serif type.
Dolce & Gabbana’s parallel work for Italian label Complice paved the way for the launch of their own secondary line, D&G. A serene Vanessa Duve, photographed by Albert Watson in 1993, models a Complice organza shirt whipped into corsages at the shoulder, with a woollen waistcoat and leggings, and set off by a military sash.
1994 saw the launch of their first men’s fragrance, Pour Homme, as well as a new home collection based on treasures the pair had sourced from travels around the world. Fitting into what Vogue described as ‘a new Arts and Crafts movement for the stay-at-home nineties’, it featured bright majolica earthenware and soft furnishings upholstered in patchworked lace, velvet and antique tapestry. Patchwork, a new Dolce & Gabbana favourite, perfectly reflected their increasingly magpie-like tastes: ‘We like [it] immensely, since it gathers different experiences and inspirations’, they explained.
In 1995, a year in which Kate Moss appeared on the cover of Vogue’s October issue in a D&G micro-skirt, the magazine illustrated a feature in its May issue on the glorious rise of the supermodel with a Snakes & Ladders game that charted twelve steps to making the grade. The twelfth step, naturally, was bagging your first Vogue cover, but the penultimate was appearing on the catwalk of Dolce & Gabbana.
By the mid-Nineties the Dolce & Gabbana woman had fully arrived, and was growing both more confident yet still retaining a mysterious allure. Vogue characterised her as having ‘a life that reaches beyond, complete with fantasy, turmoil and always a story’. The story of Dolce & Gabbana itself though was only really just beginning.
