‘Matching the opposites is the essence of our whole work and the secret behind that bit of irony we love to put into everything we do’, Stefano Gabbana once told Vogue, and hence the following season’s collection was different again. It was entitled Pigiama Barocco, though these were not indoor pyjamas. Paired with swinging crystal-embedded cocktail bags and nestled amongst more traditional high-glamour cocktail dresses, the designers here proposed a new favoured silhouette for louche eveningwear, a dress code they still believe in as they continue issuing pairs of silk pyjamas as an option for guests attending their exclusive private parties held in venues from Hollywood to Cannes.
Proving their endless appeal to performers (especially the more provocative ones), Lady Gaga dons a lace and silk-tulle form-fitting dress for photographer Josh Olins’ portrait for Vogue in 2009.
Overleaf Pyjamas for evening are a keynote for Dolce & Gabbana. In 2009 Terry Tsiolis photographed model Anna Selezneva in the louche chic of a Barolo-hued silk satin pair (left). The designers’ autumn/ winter 2009’s tribute to designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the surrealists of the early 20th century sees Sasha Pivovarova don a balloon-sleeved silk Mikado jacket and charm necklace (right) for Patrick Demarchelier.
However, one aspect had been seen consistently through the designer’s output as the 2000s drew to a close: there was more and more eveningwear on the Dolce & Gabbana catwalk, with daywear a component more likely to be found at D&G. Creatures of the night were celebrated in the most exotic way for autumn/winter 2009, a collection that saw the designers take on the legacy of legendary Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli. Shown during the same week that the designers were hosting a party for the Extreme Beauty in Vogue book, and the exhibition of the same name at Milan’s Palazzo della Ragione, Dolce & Gabbana’s own surrealist experiment took Schiaparelli’s famed balloon sleeve and mixed it with ever more extreme elements, from eye-popping Op Art mirror disc embellishment to designs in shocking pink goat fur. For Vogue, the look was the perfect pick for pop’s new surrealist queen, Lady Gaga, who smouldered like a modern-day Marilyn in a black lace dress with exploding tulle at the shoulder.
I love Dolce & Gabbana . . . I love the crazy, more eccentric stuff.
LADY GAGA
From the earliest part of their shared career, Gabbana had pressed Dolce to examine and explore the subtleties and hidden codes and of Domenico’s homeland, Sicily, to establish a solid and expressive foundation from which to take their frequent flights of fancy. They have continued to make the heart of the brand innately Sicilian. Speaking to American Vogue in 2000, Gabbana explained, ‘Sicilian style for me is about a passion for life. It’s about one colour – black – that then absorbs all the other stronger colours. Domenico has that passion for life inside him.’ For his part, Dolce offered poetically to Vogue Italia in 2005: ‘I rediscovered, thanks to Stefano, my land that I had left to arrive in Milan, a little overwhelmed, tired of excess tradition, the claustrophobic weight of a vast past. The ceramics of Caltagirone, a crochet curtain that sways in the wind, candies like colourful architecture, prickly pears, agaves, palms. A dreamlike Sicily, far away, full of symbols and suggestion, which are hidden and not given. Never.’
Dolce & Gabbana’s bustier corset has been a recurrent runway piece since the beginnings of the label. Here Willy Vanderperre photographs Kate Moss in a hessian version from 2010.
For spring/summer 2010, with a collection titled A Sicilian Way of Life, Gabbana’s fascination for Sicilian black met with Dolce’s own childhood memories of life at his father’s tailors where, as he had asserted to American Vogue in 1991, ‘By the age of six or seven, I was able to chalk up, baste, and sew a man’s jacket. By ten, I was a specialist in men’s pants.’ Four decades of experience expressed itself in masterfully crafted suits of black satin; these were set against the more familiar house favourites of black lace shifts and corsets, and interspersed with lighter looks in white broderie anglaise. Symbolising the rugged sensuality of the island and combining it with the pure sartorial wit of Dolce & Gabbana also came a corseted bodice hewn from sackcloth hessian, a design into which Vogue poured a sultry Kate Moss, in a brooding shot by Willy Vanderperre.
‘Sicily inspires us in everything we do. It is the heart and passion of this company.’
STEFANO GABBANA
By autumn 2010, Dolce & Gabbana had really come back to their homeland. Against a powerful and emotional background video showing the Dolce & Gabbana atelier at work – with Domenico tacking the lines of a lapel and Stefano sculpting sensuous dresses in black macramé, both surrounded by their doting design team in white coats – the show opened with a sextet of the ultimate Dolce & Gabbana garment: black double-breasted men’s jackets carved and padded to a full feminine curve.
An image of innocence and purity, photographed in 2013 by Venetia Scott in the beautiful country garden of Great Dixter, English rose Georgia May Jagger is a chaste beauty in a white lace dress with high neckline.
Overleaf Leopard print is a house staple, never far from the Dolce & Gabbana rack or runway. From the autumn/ winter 2005 collection the designers described as ‘La Dolce Vita meets swinging London’, model Behati Prinsloo brings a sense of Sixties chic to a printed chiffon dress (left) for photographer Paolo Roversi. Model Patricia van der Vliet gives a cool edge to the traditional craftsmanship of a white lace tunic (right) from the spring/summer 2010 collection entitled A Sicilian Way of Life. Photograph by Mario Testino.
From here came forth an immaculate collection of house hit after house hit in leopard spot, polka dot, lingerie lace, grey flannel and flecks of gold, free of all gimmickry. As Sarah Mower of American Vogue put succinctly: ‘Simply, yet movingly, they showed their classics, and how they make them.’ The show closed with a finale of 85 models re-emerging in the opening display of black jacket over black briefs, an army of beautiful and beautifully different Dolce & Gabbana women that had much of the audience (and probably some of the thousands watching the show streamed live online) in tears.
The designers had put a perfect end to their quarter century and then, again, they set about ‘matching the opposites’. If the previous collection had bathed in a dark and dreamy melancholia that captured the Sicilian widow of their dreams, for the following spring Dolce & Gabbana were to purify with an almost entirely white collection. The materials were emptied from an imagined cassone, a trousseau given to a bride filled with all the items needed to begin a newly married life.
‘To me, flowers are happiness.’
STEFANO GABBANA
From here were borrowed the broderie tablecloth edges, billowing, curtain-like tulles and of course a heavy dosage of wedding-night lingerie. A little digging revealed the subversion behind the seeming innocence, for the story of the woman they envisaged was that she was a southern (Italian) belle who had run away from the wedding, taking her trousseau with her. By the time the runaway bride reached the pages of Vogue in May, she was as far away as Africa where Tim Walker captured model Agyness Deyn hitching up a tablecloth skirt in an abandoned sand-filled house in the desert with only a cheetah for company. By June the runaway bride (now Raquel Zimmermann) was cheerful in D&G cherry print, lounging at a villa in Miami. Quite the great escape.
Shot by Tim Walker in Kolmanskop, a forgotten, sand-covered ghost town deep in the Namib desert, Agyness Deyn makes acquaintance with a cheetah in a lace-edged brocade skirt and cotton bra and knickers from the headily romantic Sicilian Sensuality collection for spring/summer 2011.
For Dolce & Gabbana, autumn/winter 2011 was the return of rock and roll: Teddy boys and glam rockers were the men from whom their woman borrowed a new set of suits for the season. She was once again a performer, in sequins and star-printed chiffon or sprinkled with musical note motifs. Citing the androgynous and elfin Janelle Monáe and the, well, androgynous and elfin David Bowie, the collection was about music’s ability to encompass gender fluidity and was a new way for the designers to display masculine tailoring for women. It also celebrated music itself. This has been a constant source of inspiration for Dolce and Gabbana, from their first nightclub rendezvous to the opening chords of the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, which open almost every Dolce & Gabbana show, to stars such as Whitney Houston and Kylie Minogue who have picked Dolce & Gabbana to costume their tours and stage performances. In 1996 Dolce and Gabbana even released a hard trance single entitled ‘D&G Music’.
Encouraging one another’s outside interests as individuals has invariably benefitted Dolce & Gabbana the collective. Following his publication of Campioni, a book of photographic portraits of prominent Italian footballers, published in 2012 Domenico Dolce felt confident enough to take over the shooting of Dolce & Gabbana’s advertising campaigns. He joined an illustrious list of photographers including Steven Meisel, Helmut Newton and Mario Sorrenti. The move was credited by Stefano Gabbana as one of several astute creative decisions that would reposition the company’s expenditure in order to weather the wake of the 2008 financial crash. The spring/ summer 2013 campaign starred Bianca Balti, Monica Bellucci and Bianca Brandolini d’Adda surrounded by hordes of male admirers on a beach in Taormina. Again, it was Gabbana who had encouraged Dolce to explore this passion. ‘The most difficult thing, during these years, is explaining what it is we really want from the pictures – what message it is we want to give the audience’, Gabbana explained. ‘We decide the models and we decide the music and we do the fittings. So we know exactly what we want to communicate to people. And so in the end, why not?’ The risk paid off, and Dolce acted as his house’s own photographer for six campaigns before handing over to Franco Pagetti, the acclaimed Italian war photographer.
Taking its lead from the mainline collection’s runaway bride theme, spring/summer 2011’s D&G collection was a cornucopia of escapist prints. Photographed by Josh Olins, Raquel Zimmermann sizzles in a cotton bikini bandeau and pencil skirt in popping cherry print.
Overleaf With Domenico Dolce shooting the spring/summer 2013 advertising campaign and Stefano Gabbana styling it, the designers showed the completeness of their vision from first sketch to point-of-sale. Starring Monica Bellucci and a supporting cast drawn from the towns and villages of Sicily, the campaign, shot on location, was inspired by Visconti’s 1948 film La Terra Trema following the trials and tribulations of a group of Sicilian fishermen.
Whilst Dolce has taken care of Dolce & Gabbana’s seasonal output of imagery, Gabbana is in his own element on social media. An Instagram addict, Gabbana spearheads the brand’s outreach into the global online community, with over 900,000 followers for his personal account alone. His celebration of new media informed the feather-ruffling decision to fill the front row of the spring/summer 2010 show with a host of the supposedly establishment-threatening new breed of bloggers in places usually reserved for the print-based elite. For the spring/summer 2016 show, models even greeted the end of the catwalk with a selfie instead of a pose for the waiting cameras in front of them.
Today the casting of models for shows and advertising campaigns is heavily influenced by their social media following and the significant promotional aspect that brings. Dolce & Gabbana took this one step further for autumn/winter 2017 womens and menswear collections.
The brand adopted a coterie of social media sensations, comprised of debutant A-list offspring, YouTube hosts followed by millions and teenage pop stars, and christened them #DGMillennials. Now they took to the Dolce & Gabbana catwalk whose front row they had graced the previous season.
As a partnership, it is perhaps the permanent presence of an ally that has helped Dolce and Gabbana survive the inevitable criticism that their profile has brought them over the years, from a bad reception of a catwalk collection (which the pair say they can sense from their brief walk onto the runway afterwards and confirm to one another with a look), to misadventures – accusations thereof – generated off the catwalk. In late 2009, as Italy reeled from the global financial crisis, the designers and several senior executives were charged with alleged tax evasion. After an investigation the previous year Italy’s fiscal authorities claimed a total of 416 million euros was owed, and at one point suggested fines of up to 800 million euros. The case, which stemmed from the sale in 2004 of both Dolce & Gabbana and D&G to a holding company in Luxembourg, was vehemently denied by the two men. It would dog them for five fraught years thanks in part to the complexity of Italy’s legal system. In October 2014 Italy’s highest court – the Corte di Cassazione – ruled that there had never been any legal grounds for the case in the first place. ‘We were certain!’ said Gabbana on social media, adding: ‘We are honest people.’
Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce pose in an explosion of ticker tape for photographer Terry Richardson in a celebratory portrait for Vogue marking the 25th anniversary of Dolce & Gabbana, April 2011.
The pair could be forgiven if they wished to wash their hands of the trials and tribulations that came with the responsibility of spearheading such a major concern. By now both fabulously wealthy, the duo could easily sell up, sit back and enjoy the spoils of a quarter of a century of work. The pair were not finished though; there was another story to be added.
