During the past few days I have been an extremely well-behaved satellite granted intermittent orbit around Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. As a consequence, it has been a period rich in new experiences.
Such as? Well, there was a black-tie supper with Matthew McConaughey and the Mayor of Milan in the designers’ restaurant (name? Gold. Decor? Guess). There was the Sicilian-style haircut in the designers’ barber shop (great job, Paolo) and a fascinating few hours observing the final fine-tune of the Dolce & Gabbana spring/summer 2011 collection in the designers’ red velvet-lined studio. I gabbled with the heart-throb Chace Crawford, the supermodel Dave Gandy and Luigi Feola, who attends to Dolce & Gabbana’s fragrance interests for Proctor & Gamble, among the diamond-chokered hostesses at Gold. Perhaps the most arresting moment came as I realised that the seam at the seat of my dinner-suits trousers had catastrophically split, thanks to Gold’s lasagne and some (I’d like to think) elegant dance moves ventured on the floor of a semi-depraved sweat-box named Plastic, at which I was dutifully witnessing Stefano Gabbana DJ-ing to a pack of delirious, screaming and overwhelmingly male clubbers.
Yet all this glamorous (trousers notwithstanding) hoo-ha, though diverting, is akin to the very heavy wooden box in which “the one” — a Dolce & Gabbana fragrance — was delivered to my hotel, or the crate of Sicilian oranges and lemons that acted as a repository for the bottle of Dolce & Gabbana “Gold”-branded Martini that was also delivered to my hotel: it was all just packaging, really. The actual product was unwrapped about 12 hours before my trouser apocalypse and ten minutes before the start of the (late-running) Dolce & Gabbana show.
The show contained 87 looks in total, running the gamut from taupe Tarzan underwear to black-tie evening slick. Which meant that there were more than 70 professional pouters with washboard stomachs sardined backstage at the Metropol theatre, all serviced by an adrenalised army of hair people, stylists, security teams, chammy-wielding polishers waging war on fingerpints and walkie-talkie-toting marshals, all of whom seemed constantly to be shouting for a model called Enrique.
The make-up artists wore bandoliers loaded with foundation, moisturiser, cover-up and brushes, with which they sheened legs, covered spots and touched up nipples. The volume was incredible.
Advertisement
“You look very relaxed,” I ventured brightly to Stefania Alafaci, the green-eyed, high-heeled overseer of Dolce & Gabbana’s backstage operation. “You are kidding, right?” responded Alafacia darkly. Next to us an American model in the middle of a back touch-up stared into the wall-to-wall mirror and repeated “underwear, underwear, underwear” to himself, over and over. “Hair? HAIR!!?” screamed a stylist. “Norman? Sergio? Texas? Eric?” screamed a marshal. “Enrique?, Enrique? ENRIQUE??” screamed another.
Then, as Stefano Gabbana looked on, Domenico Dolce straightened up from the belt he had been looping just so and strode forward, shaved head gleaming, eyes narrowed behind his thick-framed spectacles. “SILENZIO! SILENZIO!” We fell silent, sharpish. Then Annie Lennox appeared from an anteroom in possibly the widest taffeta dress ever fashioned, and strode through the throng to wild and wristy applause. The models lined up. “Oh my God,” near-whispered Stefania, so that only I could hear her. “Just look, there are so many boys!”
I missed the show, of course. That was the only downside of an exclusive spot backstage for Times Fashion. But I’m told that Lennox sang her greatest hits medley with creditable vim, that the collection was great and that, according to one London menswear fashion editor after a glass or two of wine: “It really made me well up a little.” Which is exactly what Domenico Dolce had said they wanted, as we went through the collection two days earlier.
“For years — ten years — it has been about money, stocks and money. But not now. Now it is about saying different things and taking pleasure in slow, simple things.” Simple things such as, for instance, woven canvas Oxford shoes and woven leather luggage, reversible loose swimming shorts with inbuilt underwear, and silk, unlined jackets in nearly-black and nearly-white. Like knitted polos with matching shorts and great black suits.
The shows, though, says Dolce, are now almost as much about creating a mood: “We try to make emotion.” Hence Annie Lennox and the mood-board from which the men are working. It harks back to Dolce’s Sicilian roots: they are searching for a feeling of sun-bleached afternoon bliss. Images on the board include an octopus drying in the sun, shadows of a cypress tree on a white wall, and two bare-chested boys carrying coils of rope.
Advertisement
Stefano Gabbana, a huge ruby gleaming from his finger, says that the pair started thinking about this collection, as they do about every new collection, three or four days after the last one was shown. “Over lunch. Always over lunch. I don’t know why. But I say ‘I have this idea’. And Domenico says, ‘Don’t talk to me about this idea!’ And then . . .”
The two men talk all the time when they design, says Gabbana. Dialogue drives them. “We talk. We fight (he laughs to indicate that he is joking, but probably not entirely). We are always talking.”
Two decades after their first menswear collection and 25 since they first collaborated on women’s clothes, this former couple have alchemised themselves a pot of gold. Their most powerful asset is their names, still coupled. Whether it is Dolce & Gabbana branded mobile phones, fragrance, underwear, jeans, Martini or even footballers, the imprimatur transports consumers to a place they would like to inhabit: a mythical Sicily inhabited by six-packs and sultry, lacy ladies. Dolce & Gabbana clothes and accessories sales raked in € 1.2 billion (£1 billion) in 2008.
Only Armani inhabits the same stratum in Italian fashion as they do. The clothes are still beautiful and, more often now, true to their down-south USP.
Back at Gold, after supper, Stefano Gabbana veers away briefly from Eva Herzigova, Carine Roitfeld and Rachel Weisz, hilariously to thank me for sticking around. “Not at all,” I reply, and remark how pleased he must be now the show is all over. “Over? Noooh! It’s D&G next, on Monday.” The work never ends.
Advertisement
PS: Although they were effectively destroyed by Dolce & Gabbana, the fated trousers were not made by them.
PPS: Enrique was, eventually, found.