Before the first show there were reasons to suspect that this project might well turn out to be an expensive self-indulgence. Haute couture itself had been in decline for decades. From a peak of more than 100 recognised Parisian maisons de couture in the late 1940s the Paris schedule now comprised barely 20. The 1970s rise of ready-to-wear – a phenomenon of which Dolce & Gabbana had been a beneficiary – had rendered the notion of a top-tier of fashion houses providing entirely bespoke handmade clothing practically redundant. The Paris couture shows functioned as much to create confections for the press as for clients (of whom most houses could number fewer than 100); they acted as loss-leading marketing exercises to emphasise the elevated status of those houses that still had the resources to support them. So what could Dolce & Gabbana add to the 150-year-old genre?
Previous page Damaris Goddrie and Frederikke Sofie form a perfect pair in silk-satin pyjamas of painterly rose print on a rich blue ground, photographed by Tyrone Lebon in 2016.
Their answer was revealed that July – immediately after the Paris couture shows – in the hilly Sicilian coastal resort town of Taormina. Under the direction of Cornelia ‘Coco’ Brandolini d’Adda – a scion of both the Agnelli family and Lombardian aristocracy – who was retained by Dolce & Gabbana as the ‘chief ambassador’ of Alta Moda, a guest list of 80 potential clients was invited to the first presentation. They came from Russia, Qatar, the UK, China, the US, and indeed anywhere where Brandolini and her team had surmised there lived a woman who was either so committed to Dolce & Gabbana (or more broadly to haute couture) that she might want to take part. As this was the first ever presentation of the collection – and a leap in the dark for its audience – Dolce & Gabbana contributed to their invitees’ travel and accommodation expenses, though this incentive would not long remain necessary.
‘We feel a special bond with Sicily and its people.’
STEFANO GABBANA
From the start, it was clear that this would be like no other couture show. Rather than the usual quick in-and-out of a half-an-hour presentation, Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda showing was scheduled to last two days. On the first, guests were invited to a warmup for the immersion into Italian culture to come: a performance of the Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma in Taormina’s Roman amphitheatre. Afterwards, there was a feast on a hillside that overlooked the glow of Mount Etna and the thunderclap of a specially commissioned firework display. On day two – after a morning of leisure and the chance to digest the first in what would become a series of specially commissioned books by Vogue Italia’s Art Director Luca Stoppini – came the collection.
Guests entered past a mise-en-scène of models wearing sheer lace gowns whose skirts were boned to an enormous diameter. In the grand courtyard of the monastery of San Domenico, as guests settled on scattered sofas and piles of cushions, it became apparent that this was so much more than a fashion show. There were celebrities – friends of the house such as Scarlett Johansson and Monica Bellucci – and there was press – journalists from three European newspapers and representatives from around ten international editions of Vogue. But apart from Dolce & Gabbana’s own, there were no photographers. The journalists had been invited on the proviso that they did not reveal the names of any clients without their express permission – and everybody was asked not to share any photographs of the clothes on social media. Vogue’s editors were to be offered the opportunity to shoot a very small selection of looks should they so desire. Why all the (relative) confidentiality? ‘Because no client wants to see a picture of her dress – her unique, one-off dress – in the newspaper,’ said Gabbana.
One-by-one, seventy-three designs then came crunching sedately down the gravel, each perfectly rendered in superlative fabrics, often woven through with real gold thread, such as silk organdie crépon, brocade and astoundingly detailed lace. Travelling through a section of tailored daywear with lace overlaid, the show climaxed with a series of hand-painted ballgowns echoing Claudia Cardinale’s room-transfixers in The Leopard. Immaculate chignons were accented by vintage hats, reworked and embellished, or with garlands of blossom. Some extraordinary pieces of Alta Gioielleria, their fine jewellery line, including gold starburst pendants strung on black velvet ribbon and huge baroque gold and ruby earrings, were made to complement various pieces. Understandably in awe, Vogue Italia described the collection as ‘masterpieces made to be interpreted by extraordinary women’.
For autumn/winter 2012’s inaugural Alta Moda collection, Boo George photographed model Karlina Caune as the chatelaine of a golden country estate. Here, she wears a hand-painted silk-organdie crépon dress with a straw hat adorned with velvet roses.
Overleaf In a pastoral setting, Boo George gives the Dolce & Gabbana leading lady the air of a Marie Antoinette-style shepherdess in further pieces from the 2012 Alta Moda collection – a hand-painted organza dress with pannier petticoat and silk organdie headpiece.
Despite the heat (several guests fainted during the weekend), it was an intensely romantic, utterly immersive show. Afterwards guests were invited to view the collection and consider purchase, assured only one of each would ever be made. Certain clients ordered several pieces and many others one or two, and by the end of the evening these privileged women, their swains and retinue, plus the designers and a selection of the fashion faithful were all dancing in a Taormina cypress grove. For all of its extravagance, here Dolce & Gabbana were in fact showing their own fashion pragmatism. One of the many reasons cited for the demise of traditional haute couture, which had survived several recessions, was a move to more casual living. An informal world of comfortable sneakers and greater democracy had done away with occasion dressing, elaborate balls and debutantes; so, here Dolce & Gabbana provided not only outrageously opulent fashion, but also an event at which to wear it. From here, the shows would grow only more elaborate in setting and execution, giving potential clients a dream to buy into.
‘No matter how old you are, you never stop dreaming, so why would you when it comes to clothes?’
STEFANO GABBANA
The second show, held in Milan in January 2013, showed clients the extent to which Dolce & Gabbana had committed their resources to this tilt at greatness. The collection was presented in the new Alta Moda salone, a large recently purchased suite of several floors just behind Via della Spiga. On its roof – after some wrangling with Milan’s planning authorities – they had built an extra floor clad in glass in which to entertain guests after the collection, as well as to present their now established Alta Gioielleria collection of fine jewellery. The idea, it seemed, was to create a hermetically sealed luxury environment in which to seduce – with great panache – the by now 100-strong list of invited clients and potential clients.
Vogue Contributing Editor Alexa Chung adds a touch of barrow-boy chic to an abbreviated duchesse satin dress with an oversize Sicilian-style coppola flat cap. The product of 80 seamstresses’ work, the dress is beautifully embellished with lace macramé and appliquéd velvet flowers. Photographed by Patrick Demarchelier in 2013.
A very few of them – the most committed – were also given the chance to tour one of the Alta Moda ateliers. The largest of these, at a secret Milan address, employs several scores of technicians – who wear black lace collars over the traditional white lab coats to work – over four floors. This is where new fabrics are developed, the vintage fabrics that are incorporated into certain looks each season are reworked, and all of the embroidery and other detailing is perfected. Typically each dress takes five seamstresses four to five days from start to finish. Then there is another, entirely separate tailoring atelier, which was starting to share some resources with menswear, for a number of one-off commissions. The main atelier contained the specially made mannequins that are constructed for each new client, to conform exactly to their measurements for fitting and checks between appointments. It is run by a première (head dressmaker) with 22 years’ experience working for the company. The staff working below her, said Gabbana, ‘are the ones who have been with us forever, the best’.
Thematically, the second Alta Moda presentation explored the idea of uniting fashion and context, with the parade of sumptuous looks featuring embellishments based on curlicued mouldings on the walls of the newly refurbished Via Senato salon. Tailoring – just a few pieces – featured inside-out inverted stitching to hint at the architecture of canvas and panel behind the façade. The more extravagantly grandiose pieces included tulle gowns peppered with shards of coral and jewels. The last look was accessorised with a crown and a pair of kitten heels wrought of solid gold and lined in quilted satin. Apparently, they sold.
From here, Alta Moda would stage its elaborate presentations, season by season, all over Italy, celebrating the inspiration that each region had provided to the house. The summer 2013 host locale was Venice, with a magnificent show held in the salon of the Palazzo Barbaro. The collection featured lace cut into harlequin panels and climaxed with ballgowns painted with homages to Canaletto and the Venetian cityscape. It featured a 700-piece dress that had taken a total of three months to complete. Lisa Armstrong of The Daily Telegraph concluded, ‘This was certainly the best show of couture week, which is quite a feat considering they’ve only been making couture for three seasons.’ That evening, Dolce & Gabbana had arranged a masked ball for clients to dance anonymously in Alta Moda until dawn.
Following the January 2014 spring/summer collection back in Milan – which featured dresses embellished with decorations drawn from flowers painted by artists including Van Gogh, Renoir, Manet and Klimt – that summer 200 guests, including the members of one Middle Eastern royal family and the wife and daughters of one former head of state, were invited to Capri. Of the presentation Domenico Dolce said: ‘It’s about this place, Capri: our ultimate fantasy version of it … as well as being about the clothes. In Alta Moda we try and communicate a total feeling, a complete emotion in the show.’ It was held near dusk on a picturesque outcrop in the shadow of the Faraglioni rocks, which had also provided the backdrop for David Gandy in the Light Blue fragrance campaign shot so memorably by Mario Testino. The models arrived around the headland on ribbon-strewn boats, stepped onto a jetty and then moved on into the crowd.
Shot for Vogue by Boo George in Capri (where the autumn/ winter 2014 collection had been shown that July), model Kinga Rajak sports a hand-painted map of the glamorous island made into a sculptural and feminine dress.
The collection featured a contrast between decadently rendered leisurewear – shaved bustier-bikinis, chinchilla t-shirts, bloomers and moonboots – and full-skirted, deckchair-stripe, fantasy frocks topped by hand-embroidered parasols sprinkled with gemstones. Fur-trimmed tweed jackets, sheath dresses in vintage brocades from the 1950s and 1960s, drop-waisted skirts with the outline of the Capri coastline etched in sequins, and one dress with hidden integrated miniature cymbals that tinkled as the wearer walked were a few of the other standout looks. The climax of the show saw yet another boat cut across the sea, with a veiled model wearing a full-skirted wedding dress at its prow like a figurehead and as the sun slipped below the horizon there was a 20-minute firework extravaganza.
‘It’s the fashion system’s fault that no one tells a story today’ offered Stefano Gabbana at the autumn/ winter 2015 Alta Moda collection shown in the designers’ own properties in Portofino on the Ligurian coast. In response came a fantastical collection inspired by Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, including these two full-skirted gowns, in vivid silk-screened prints of watermelons and macaws, with crystal corseted bustiers.
As had become form for the spring/summer collections, the show the following January was held in Milan. The venue, however, was both new and a coup. The previous November the designers decided to theme their collection around the history of ballet and opera at La Scala, Milan’s great eighteenth-century opera house. When they approached Alexander Pereira, La Scala’s newly appointed CEO and artistic director, to obtain permission Dolce also threw in a supplemental request: might they hold their show there, too? This seemed the stuff of fantasy: La Scala had never opened its heavy wooden doors to Milan’s fashion industry before. But, said Dolce, ‘if I hadn’t asked the question, it would have kept bothering me.’ Pereira said yes. Gabbana said that the designers were both elated and flabbergasted: ‘Afterward, I was trying to keep a straight face, but in the car home I was screaming. For us to be here is amazing – like touching the sky with your finger.’
The spring/summer 2015 show was held in the ornate marble galleria that flanks the main auditorium. By now there were nearly 200 clients on the Alta Moda roster – many of them now set-in-stone regulars, whose husbands and partners had themselves become clients of the slowly emerging menswear equivalent. The collection featured a greater emphasis than previously on day-wear: there were 15 black dresses in wool and crêpe cut to exactingly precise variations of the designer’s core repertoire of proportion and silhouette. This almost straightforward section, however, was enveloped in romance. The show opened and closed with world-renowned ballet dancer Roberto Bolle and six coral-tulle-clad dancers from La Scala’s academy dancing, beautifully, down the parquet catwalk. Bolero jackets, opera cloaks and closely fitted matador trousers marched between whooshes of rustling vintage jacquard organza. Vintage ballet posters appeared as if plastered billboard-style, first in sequinned shift tops and then in hand-screened sheets of silk on huge gowns skirted in scarlet, black or white tulle. Afterwards, Gabbana remarked: ‘This is about experimentation and about training. Every season we move and every season the quality improves. Alta Moda has taught us both to move with more freedom. OK, we have to think about the market. But we do not care so much about that now. Through Alta Moda we have become more confident to express ourselves.’
Jarno Boom models a striped cream and powder-blue double-breasted suit sumptuously embroidered with a climbing rose for the autumn/winter 2015 Alta Sartoria presentation, also held in Portofino.
Overleaf The spring/summer 2016 Alta Moda collection had the Via San Gregorio Armeno in the heart of old Naples as its catwalk. Here, model Yumi Lambert appears in ecclesiastical splendour in a fabulously embroidered gold brocade mantle and matching mitre.
Autumn/winter 2015 saw the first Alta Sartoria – couture tailoring for men – presentation to be held alongside those for Alta Moda and Alta Gioielleria, completing an all-encompassing project later labelled Alte Artigianalità. The venue was Portofino, where both Dolce and Gabbana own exclusive nearby mansions clinging to the rocks. Literally presenting the shows in their own back yard – ‘Stefano’s house is the showroom, my house is a backstage for the models’ Dolce told Vogue.com – there was of course nothing else domestic about it. The fabulous Alta Moda show, which drew on the fantastical literature of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll, saw hand-printed silks adorn skirts (now more softly built in volume with layers of silk petticoats) that graced models sweeping through arches of fresh flowers. The following evening’s debut Alta Sartoria show featured everything a gentleman could need to dress for an evening of luxury, from velvet tuxedos embroidered exquisitely with exotic birds in the Japanese style to the pyjamas to wake up in the next day.
