‘SICILIAN STYLE FOR ME IS ABOUT A PASSION FOR LIFE. IT’S ABOUT ONE COLOUR – BLACK – THAT THEN ABSORBS ALL THE OTHER STRONGER COLOURS.’

STEFANO GABBANA

As Dolce & Gabbana’s suggestive but still chaste unbuttoned-ness morphed into a more potent expression of sexuality, they turned for inspiration to Sophia Loren. Across the entire span of their career, the almond-eyed and buxom Loren is the woman cited most often by Dolce & Gabbana as a muse. Perhaps what first seduced them was the black satin corset she wore to bamboozle Peter Sellers in The Millionairess in 1960; indeed it is a garment that has remained a key part of the Dolce & Gabbana armoury from almost the very beginning. It may also be the fact that Loren brings with her an inescapable, very southern Italian warmth and zext for life that is another key part of the brand’s appeal. Like their other living muses, Loren has gone from distant fascination to become part of the Dolce & Gabbana family. Honoured in 2015 with her own shade of red Dolce & Gabbana lipstick (Sophia Loren No. 1, no less) the pair also cast Loren as their matriarch for an Ennio-Morricone-soundtracked television advert for the 2016 launch of their Dolce Rosa Excelsa perfume. Most recently, Dolce & Gabbana dedicated a sensational fashion show to Loren staged on the streets of her home town of Naples, with Loren guest of honour on her own throne as marching bands cheered the Neapolitan anthem ‘Funiculì, Funiculà’.

An original house muse and bridge between Cinecittàera cinema and new Hollywood, Isabella Rossellini is embraced by Dolce & Gabbana’s marabou stole and photographed by Sante d’Orazio in 1991.

Whilst Dolce & Gabbana set about defining a canon of muses around which to build their imagined Italianate universe, they rapidly caught the eye of contemporary young women who shared a similar aesthetic urge. One of the first of these was actress Isabella Rossellini – daughter of Ingrid Bergman and of Roberto Rossellini, the director who worked particularly closely with Anna Magnani – who was introduced to the pair by Vogue photographer Steven Meisel in 1987. In a book published by the designers to mark their ten-year anniversary, Rossellini said: ‘The first piece I wore from their collection was a white shirt, very chaste with a beautiful handmade embroidered collar. But the shirt was purposefully cut to make my breasts look as if they would burst out of it. It was Domenico and Stefano underlining and revealing a very Italian way of seduction. The unspoken, inexplicit message of the woman that states, “No matter how much we try our bodies are so voluptuous that they cannot be contained in any clothes”.’ Dolce later recalled: ‘Of course, Isabella understood Neorealism better than anyone: her father, Roberto Rossellini, invented it. She knew everything about being Italian. She even knows the village in Sicily I was born in.’

Rossellini took to the Dolce & Gabbana catwalk for a number of their early shows; she brought a theatrical quality that particularly enhanced the more androgynous elements of the feminised masculine tailoring for which Dolce & Gabbana were growing famous. Gabbana observed, ‘There are many women inside of Isabella. The mother, the erotic type, the lover, the bad girl …’ This was seen to optimum effect in Vogue’s December 1991 issue where Rossellini appeared in a shot by Sante d’Orazio laid back in bliss wrapped only in white marabou and a lick of red lipstick. Rossellini, through lineage and her own attributes, can be seen to capture the mission of Dolce & Gabbana to present a modern femininity in fashion through interpretations of both contemporary and historical Italian-ness.

Supermodel Tatjana Patitz as a modern-day Venus in Dolce & Gabbana’s ultra-glamorous cotton and lycra body encrusted with rows of radiant rhinestones. Photographed by Herb Ritts for Vogue’s ‘Modern Metallics’ story in 1991.

Dolce & Gabbana‘s original classical Italian feminine archetype evolved into something evoking a more international sense of glamour through collections such as the clingy, crystal-laden Little Italy collection for autumn/winter 1990. The star of that collection’s seething and dramatic advertising campaign was Dolce & Gabbana’s latest prima donna, Linda Evangelista, the Canadian supermodel born of Italian emigré parents. In the advertising campaign, Evangelista took on a range of roles, from brassy to browbeaten, returning alongside fellow supermodel Christy Turlington for the following season’s campaign. In this, Gabbana asserted, ‘Linda became Sophia Loren; her lips a little down at the corner, the cat eyes. Totally the same.’

With their spring/summer 1992 collection (called simply La Dolce Vita), Dolce & Gabbana’s quintessential Italian heroine came to the attention of a growing international audience. Partly this was thanks to Linda Evangelista, who was so taken by the collection while being fitted that she telephoned a roster of her fellow supermodels – including Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Yasmeen Ghauri, Tatjana Patitz, Carla Bruni and Helena Christensen – who all agreed to model the collection in exchange for clothes (Gabbana later said that they all wanted corsets). The collection, perhaps the pair’s most provocative yet, was all-out glamour, figuratively (and occasionally literally) spelling out SEX in rhinestone and with suspended stockings, marabou trim and cinched corsetry. Women’s Wear Daily described it as ‘an ode to Barbarella and Frederick’s of Hollywood’ [the sexy science-fiction film and the lingerie specialists]. Rossellini also returned to the runway, alongside another long-term Dolce & Gabbana model and friend Monica Bellucci, herself a successful actress of growing repute at home in Italy and abroad. A masterclass in boudoir dressing appropriated for the street, La Dolce Vita particularly appealed to a new friend of the house, one who represented the perfect embodiment of Dolce & Gabbana’s projection of Italian femininity onto a modern and international stage.

Alla Kostromicheva, photographed by Daniel Jackson, brings a harder, more modern edge to a classic feminine silhouette wearing Dolce & Gabbana’s black lace skirt and signature corset, its base structured like the top of a crinoline – ‘a confection of tulle and lace’ said Vogue in 2010.

T he designers had first met Madonna in late 1989 when she was filming Dick Tracy in New York. They had excitedly spotted her wearing a black crochet design of theirs in a party picture in the International Herald Tribune and contacted her to offer more pieces. A dinner in Chelsea led to a night of clubbing and an after party chez Madonna, and an enduring friendship began. For the 1991 New York premiere of her documentary In Bed With Madonna (Truth or Dare in the US) – in which she declared his gift of a Dolce & Gabbana shirt as Warren Beatty’s route to her heart – La Ciccone donned a top-to-toe look of jewel-encrusted body and black stockings that confirmed her deep affinity with the Dolce & Gabbana brand of sexy subversion.

Madonna shared many of Dolce & Gabbana’s preoccupations: sex, provocation, using religious iconography in a creative but nevertheless sacrilegious way, and her Italian heritage. She also was – and of course remains – one of the world’s pre-eminent and most recognisable stars. Celebrity and the fashion industry were becoming closely entwined, something that Dolce and Gabbana were increasingly intrigued by. Most specifically, she was demonstrating how one could grow an international following whilst keeping a sense of subversion. With the house becoming more firmly ensconced within the Milan fashion establishment and now selling in 350 stores around the world, Madonna as high priestess of controversy appealed to a duo wishing to retain their edge.

Their involvement with Madonna led to a controversy within the Italian fashion establishment when Dolce & Gabbana held a dinner in Madonna’s honour at the same time as Giorgio Armani’s Emporio show at the Milan spring/summer 1993 collections in October 1992, thus challenging the loyalties of the fashion press. Responding to accusations that the designers had paid Madonna $500,000 to appear in an effort to sabotage their rival, Gabbana vowed to The New York Times, ‘I would swear in front of the real Madonna we did not pay’.

At the 1991 New York premiere for her film In Bed With Madonna (Truth or Dare), the star looked sensational in a Dolce & Gabbana corset covered in multicoloured stones and charms from autumn/winter 1991’s Le Pin Up collection.

Madonna had certainly been seduced by Dolce & Gabbana and would go on to wear a number of custom-made pieces for her Girlie Show world tour the following year. Of the house’s appeal she said, ‘Now that Fellini, Rossellini, Pasolini and Visconti are gone, all we have is Dolce & Gabbana: neo-realistic fashion.’ More recently Madonna appeared as a dishwashing, spaghetti-devouring matriarch in black- and-white scenes of neo-Neorealism for the spring/summer 2010 advertising campaign.

Whilst women came first for Dolce & Gabbana, men were not too far behind. Launching their menswear line in 1989, the pair told Italian L’Uomo Vogue they were fixated on dressing ‘a modern man, without prejudice and attached to traditional values’, citing both the aristocratic airs of Visconti’s leading men and the ‘rags’ of traditional Sicilian workmen. Their early menswear carried with it the sensuality of their womenswear and focused particularly on knitwear. For the time being Dolce & Gabbana would leave cashmere to the older masters, favouring coarse, thick and loosely woven wools in raw and earthy shades to reflect their rustic and rugged archetype.

Alongside their woman, the Dolce & Gabbana man has his own distinct personality, if somewhat less informed by specific real-life and fictional icons. The Dolce & Gabbana man’s closest living relative is the working Sicilian at leisure, who over the years has frequently returned to the catwalk in ribbed white vest, draped in his fishing nets, or donning an urchin-like coppola flat cap. For spring/summer 2013 this Sicilian became truly incarnate on the catwalk, as Domenico and Stefano cast a number of men and boys from villages and towns across Sicily to embody their tale of Sicilian folklore and the Ages of Man. This approach lasted for a number of seasons and is frequently incorporated into the casting of their menswear shows.

The culture of competitive sport is a leading influence on the look of the Dolce & Gabbana man, reflected here in a Vogue Men shoot by Peggy Sirota of a ribbed wool sweater and cotton jersey shorts from the spring/ summer 1991 collection.

Other men that naturally inhabit the Dolce & Gabbana world are those the designers see as modern-day gladiators: sportsmen. From the publication of Calcio (Soccer) in 2003, a Mariano Vivanco-shot tome of footballers in Dolce & Gabbana, the brand has retained strong links with the sporting world. Both AC Milan and Chelsea FC have been dressed in suits by Dolce & Gabbana for appearances off the pitch, and members of Italian national teams from cycling to swimming and, of course, football have stripped down for various underwear advertising campaigns.

If one figure has to come to embody the Dolce & Gabbana man in recent years, it is the sportsmanlike physique of David Gandy, who emerged from relative obscurity in 2006 to star in Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue fragrance campaign shot by Mario Testino. Here, in a pair of white swimming trunks enjoying a secluded lagoon and a dinghy with a comparatively covered-up Marija Vujovic, Gandy and the campaign launched a wave of passionate, almost hysterical admiration and a hugely successful global modelling career. For all its camp, it is worth highlighting that the Light Blue campaign emerged during a period of men’s fashion where the sole male ideal was that of a pale, teenage ectomorphic waif. Through Gandy and his sporting compatriots, Dolce & Gabbana have helped to reintroduce the hyper-athletic to the forefront of fashion.

Having introduced ideal men and women, inevitably Dolce & Gabbana now provide for an entire family, with that quintessentially Italian multi-generational affection reflected in everything from Dolce & Gabbana’s childrenswear, launched in 2012 to recent campaigns featuring selfie-taking, garlanded and gossiping grandmothers. For a label so proudly Italian, it makes sense for Dolce & Gabbana to build a business around la famiglia, even coining the Instagram tag #DGFamily as part of their social media presence, celebrating the broad (if almost exclusively gorgeous) range of groups and individuals welcomed into their fold.

Sporting the white bathing trunks immortalised in the Light Blue fragrance campaign that he has fronted – with a succession of female co-stars – for over a decade, David Gandy takes to the catwalk at Dolce & Gabbana’s spring/ summer 2007 menswear show in Milan.

Their reverence for the traditional structure of the Italian family brought controversy for the designers in 2015 following a collection entitled Viva la Mamma, dedicated to mothers and featuring several children on the catwalk too. In an interview for the Italian news magazine Panorama, Dolce said: ‘You are born and you have a father and a mother. At least it should be like that.’ This and further comments by Dolce about non-traditional methods of conception acted – once translated into English – as the spark for a fast-burning social media firestorm. Soon afterwards the designers moved to clarify their position, and apologised for causing offence. In an interview with Details magazine Gabbana emphasised he had told the same interviewer of his own desire to have children. Dolce added: ‘The writer asked me to talk about the concept of family. So I talked about what I have grown up with, my culture, the Italian idea of family. Whether you are gay, not gay, whether you have a baby or not, whatever you do – it is your choice and it is no business of mine … I am just a tailor, and I talk with the words I have.’

Today, the members of the Dolce & Gabbana family featuring on its billboards are of all ages, countries and kinds, reflecting the multifaceted consumer base it now has as a major, multi-billion-dollar international brand. Its roots, however, are always traceable back to Mother Italy.