Around this erotic severity came stiff car coats, buttoned pencil skirts, carved tailoring and corsetry, with the camper whimsy of Cabiria herself (a Roman prostitute looking hopelessly for love) served in frothy, yet elegant and feminine floral chiffons whipped into gossamer-light sheaths over corsetry.
Dolce & Gabbana revisited Fellini for autumn/winter 1997, this time citing his 1972 epic, Roma. This collection drew on the film’s ecclesiastical costuming, creating strict and sensual full-length buttoned cassock coats and tops emblazoned with icons of the Madonna and child. This union of cinema and Roman Catholicism has provided Dolce & Gabbana with one of its most enduring themes, threading through the decades, perhaps most inventively in the spring/summer 2013 Hitchcock-meets-Byzantine collection where curvacious peplums paired with prints lifted from the mosaicked walls of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Nuova in the Sicilian town of Monreale.
The purity of a white stretch-silk chiffon dress with geometric seams and boning, from autumn/winter 1997’s Roma-inspired collection, looks perfect on the clean and classic beauty of Kirsty Hume. Photograph by Tom Munro.
Overleaf Religious imagery and themes return time and again for Dolce & Gabbana. With the kitsch charm of a Vatican souvenir, a portable sequin-strewn shrine of a handbag (left) is photographed by Raymond Meier in 1998. Carolyn Murphy models a glittery Madonna and child top and embroidered headscarf (right) for spring/ summer 1998’s Stromboli collection. Photograph by Andrew Lamb.
The very fabrics of church – brocade, crimson velvet, white lace, black veiling and that very Catholic gilt – pervade the atmosphere of every show almost like incense. It is what gives their underlying (or, often, overwritten) sexuality such a wicked frisson. Whilst the traditions, rites and rituals of Catholicism appeal profoundly to the Dolce & Gabbana sensibility, they are necessarily balanced with a more modern attitude that appears often through innovation in craftsmanship.
Inspired by a summer holiday in Stromboli, for spring/summer 1998 Dolce & Gabbana recreated everything from the headscarves of its working women (this time elevated with intricate floral embroidery) to its summertime butterflies settling in kaleidoscopic patterns on a number of swagged-tulle bodices with breezy bias-cut skirts. However, the soft, nostalgic mood was countered by a number of acid-bright latex dresses, which Vogue praised as Dolce & Gabbana ‘taking the dress into the twenty-first century’.
In using tradition to inspire invention Dolce & Gabbana often pay tribute to those fellow fashion designers past and present whom they admire. Even the leopard print, which is such a recognisable part of the house’s handwriting, they acknowledge is a tribute to Yves St Laurent, a designer they frequently reference in admiration of his virtuosity in cut and colour. For autumn/winter 1998, Dolce & Gabbana honoured two mid-century masters of haute couture, Christian Dior and Cristóbal Balenciaga, in a collection focused on the two key aspects of the medium: tailleur (tailoring) and flou (soft dressmaking). The collection incorporated a sense of fashion futurism enhanced by a series of mercurial silver lamé dresses built on a foundation of intricately boned corsetry.
At the close of the millennium, Dolce & Gabbana embarked on a series of experiments with fabric to invigorate the classic shapes they had established as perfect for womankind in any era. Here, Amber Valletta models a cleanly cut strapless sheath in shimmering blue laser hologram vinyl photographed by Nathaniel Goldberg in 1999.
The designers continued to explore futuristic themes. With their spring/summer 1999 collection, wryly named The New Black, the duo looked at the new working woman’s wardrobe, based around the classic little black dress. Many designs came accessorised with a utilitarian, new-century take on the maid’s apron, set askew: a nod to how far the notion of woman’s work had come. The collection also came with a new high-tech holographic fabric, developed by Dolce & Gabbana, carved into body-conscious shifts and pencil skirts. This stride toward a brave new world was interpreted by Nathaniel Goldberg for Vogue on model Amber Valletta in a Dolce & Gabbana iridescent sheath, marching down a staircase that looked like the set from Fritz Lang’s science-fiction film Metropolis. By autumn/winter 1999, a huge variety of materials, including goat hair, tartan, denim and tie-dyed fur, were added to the leopard print, plastic and holographic PVC that were already part of the house’s eclectic elements. Christened Kitsch, this collection fully distinguished itself from the decade’s prevailing minimalism, with Gabbana later telling American Vogue, ‘I don’t know if we have good taste or bad taste – but we have a taste!’
