The corset is black, boned, and sits over a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled
The corset is black, boned, and sits over a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled. The skirt is pencil-cut, ending mid-calf. The model wears her hair pinned at the crown, a few tendrils loose. It is 1987, and Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have just shown their first independent collection in Milan. The silhouette is not new. It is lifted directly from the wardrobe of Sicilian widows, from Anna Magnani in the postwar films, from the women who wore black for years and moved through their villages like architecture. What is new is the claim that this could be luxury.
Dolce & Gabbana did not invent Italian fashion. They arrived after Armani had deconstructed the jacket, after Versace had turned sex into a business plan. What they did was insist that Italy was not one country. It was regions, dialects, the difference between a northern tailor and a southern seamstress. They made clothes for the latter and sold them to the world as high fashion. The early collections were specific to the point of anthropology: the lace of a particular town, the corsetry that Sicilian women used not for seduction but for support, the black that was mourning and also practicality. The palette was narrow. Black, white, ivory, the occasional red. The materials were cotton, silk, lace that had structure. The fit was exact. A Dolce & Gabbana corset in 1989 did not approximate the shape of a torso. It re-made it.
This was the first era. Call it 1985 to 1995. The house built its vocabulary: undergarments as outerwear, the bra as a garment with its own integrity, the slip dress that moved like water but held a line. They worked in opposites. Masculine tailoring over lace. Pinstripes with lingerie. A tuxedo jacket worn open over a boned bustier. The woman they dressed was not innocent, but she was never vulgar. She knew the weight of fabric and how to use it.
The Leopard Print Years
By the mid-1990s, the corset had become a cliché, and Dolce & Gabbana knew it. They shifted. The spring 1997 collection opened with leopard print—not as an accent but as a premise. Coats, dresses, heels, bags. The animal print that had been shorthand for a certain kind of woman was now rendered in silk charmeuse and cut with the precision the house had learned in its first decade. What followed was a ten-year period in which Dolce & Gabbana became, for better and worse, the house of more.
More gold. More baroque. More cleavage, more embellishment, more references to Catholicism rendered as spectacle. The clothes from this era did not whisper. A spring 2006 dress might combine Sicilian cart paintings, gold brocade, a hemline above the knee, and a neckline that started somewhere south of modest. The house showed in venues that matched the volume: opera houses, palazzos, spaces with frescoed ceilings. The models were not waifs. They were Scarlett Johansson, Monica Bellucci, Sophia Loren in the front row. The campaigns featured families—large, loud, multigenerational—gathered around tables in the Italian sun. This was fashion as abundance, as unapologetic pleasure.
The criticism was immediate and has never stopped. The clothes were too much, too obvious, too tied to a version of Italian identity that flattened regional difference into a single, exportable image. The maison leaned into archetypes: the Sicilian widow became the Sicilian bombshell, the tailor's precision became gold filigree, the lace became see-through. But the work was technically impeccable. A Dolce & Gabbana gown from 2005, however laden with crystals, still moved like clothing. The construction underneath the decoration was sound.
This was also the era in which the house became a commercial empire. Fragrances, eyewear, watches, a children's line, a men's line that rivalled the women's in ambition. The logo—a clean, serif typeface—appeared on everything. Dolce & Gabbana became a brand that people recognised before they understood what it stood for. The question of whether that was a compromise or an evolution depends on what you think fashion is for.
Alta Moda and the Return to Craft
In 2012, Dolce & Gabbana staged their first alta moda presentation. Not a ready-to-wear collection scaled up, but couture: one-of-a-kind pieces, hand-sewn, shown in Taormina to an audience of clients who could afford them. The location mattered. Taormina is in Sicily, and the message was clear. This was not Paris couture. It was a different tradition, rooted in the ateliers of southern Italy, in the women who still embroider by hand, who still know how to construct a sleeve that requires no shoulder pad.
The alta moda collections have continued twice a year since then, each in a different Italian city, each a technical showcase. A 2019 dress might take 1,800 hours to complete. The embroidery is Sicilian, but also Venetian, Florentine, depending on the city. The silhouettes reference the house's early years—corsetry, tailoring, black lace—but the execution is more elaborate. What was once a cotton slip is now silk organza with hand-painted lemons. What was once a simple bustier is now a structured bodice with applied mosaic in gold leaf.
The alta moda work exists separately from the ready-to-wear, which has continued in its own register. The runway shows are still large, still loud, still populated by influencers and celebrities. The clothes still reference Italy, still use animal print, still cut low. But the alta moda offers a counter-narrative. It suggests that Dolce & Gabbana, underneath the branding and the spectacle, remain craftspeople. That they can still make a sleeve that fits without ease, a corset that reshapes a body, a gown that requires a team of hands.
Whether this division—commercial fashion on one side, couture on the other—represents integrity or hedging is an open question. The house has never pretended to choose. They do both, at volume, and they do not apologise.
Where the House Stands
Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana are still the creative directors. This is increasingly rare. Most houses their age have cycled through multiple designers, have been absorbed into conglomerates, have softened their original vision in pursuit of market share. Dolce & Gabbana remains independently owned, and the clothes still look like Dolce & Gabbana clothes. The continuity is absolute. A spring 2024 collection features the same corsetry, the same animal print, the same devotion to the female form that the house established in 1987. The question is whether that continuity is a strength or a limitation.
The house has faced controversies—comments, campaigns, accusations of insensitivity—and each time, the response has been defiance rather than apology. This is consistent with the brand's ethos. Dolce & Gabbana has never courted the approval of critics or the fashion establishment. They make clothes for clients, for women who want to be seen, for a version of Italy that may be more constructed than real but is no less potent for it.
The runway shows remain events. The alta moda presentations remain technical feats. The ready-to-wear remains commercially successful. And the house remains, in 2024, exactly what it has always been: specific, stubborn, and unwilling to pretend that fashion is anything other than a business built on desire.
There is a photograph from the spring 2023 alta moda show in Puglia. A model walks through an olive grove in a gown that required six months to make. The bodice is embroidered with wheat stalks in gold thread. The skirt is layers of tulle, each one hand-painted. She is wearing flat sandals because the ground is uneven. Behind her, the same olive trees that have been there for three hundred years. The gown will be worn once, maybe twice. The trees will outlast it. Dolce & Gabbana have always understood that tension—the ephemeral and the enduring, the spectacle and the soil.