The corset on the runway is black, boned, and laced over a white cotton shirt

The corset on the runway is black, boned, and laced over a white cotton shirt. It is not a reference. It is the same corset the house has been making since 1987, adjusted for the body beneath it but otherwise unchanged. Dolce & Gabbana does not retire its codes. It recombines them. Spring after spring, the corset returns, and so does the question: what does it mean to keep saying the same thing?

The founding syntax

Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana showed their first collection in Milan in 1985. The clothes were black, white, and red. They referenced southern Italy—not the Italy of the aristocracy, but of the street, the widow, the festa. Lace over skin. A slip as outerwear. The bra as structure, not secret. By 1987 they had the corset. By 1990 they had the animal print. By 1992 they had the word Sicily on a dress, which was both literal and not literal at all.

The house built its language quickly and then spoke it without apology. Madonna wore the cone bra Jean Paul Gaultier made for her Blond Ambition tour in 1990, but she wore Dolce & Gabbana's black lace and corsetry for everything else that decade. The clothes were not subtle. They were not interested in subtlety. They proposed that femininity could be armour, that Catholicism and sexuality could share a frame, that a woman could dress like a fantasy and still be the one in control of it.

This was the work. For thirty years, the house refined the same vocabulary: corsets, lace, brocade, majolica prints, lemons, roses, the sacred heart, the black dress that clung and then flared. Men's tailoring pulled from the same well—three-piece suits in silk jacquard, the gangster as romantic figure, the undershirt as formalwear. It was maximalist, but it was also disciplined. The house knew what it was.

The decade of noise

What changed was not the clothes. What changed was everything around them.

In 2012, Dolce & Gabbana's revenue hit €1.7 billion. The brand had stores in 44 countries. It dressed every celebrity who wanted to signal a particular kind of glamour—Scarlett Johansson, Monica Bellucci, Beyoncé in custom gold brocade. Then the noise began.

Tax evasion charges in Italy, later overturned. A 2015 interview in which the designers spoke against same-sex adoption, sparking boycotts. The 2018 Shanghai show, cancelled after a promotional video was widely criticised as racist. A defamation case in 2019 involving designers Stefano Gabbana's Instagram activity. The list is long, and it does not need to be recited in full here. What matters is the cumulative effect: a house that had always been provocative became something else. Not dangerous, but loud. Not transgressive, but tabloid.

The clothes kept coming. The corsets, the lace, the lemons. But the context had split open. Dolce & Gabbana was no longer a vision of Italian sexuality and craft. It was a culture-war flashpoint, a meme, a case study in crisis management. The question was no longer What do these clothes mean? but Can you still wear them?

What sells now

Dolce & Gabbana reported €1.9 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2023. The business is larger than it was a decade ago, and it is not collapsing. But the growth is not in the corset. It is in the sneaker.

The house's Portofino sneaker—white leather, logo at the heel—has become a quiet bestseller, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. So have the logo-tape tracksuits, the DG-monogrammed belt bags, the slides. These are not the clothes that built the brand. They are the accessories that sustain it. Dolce & Gabbana now operates as two businesses in parallel: the runway, which continues to produce the baroque, body-conscious pieces the house is known for, and the product line, which has leaned into logo-driven casualwear that competes with Balenciaga, Gucci, and Versace for the same customer.

The haute couture atelier, launched in 2012, continues. The pieces are one-of-a-kind, often commissioned, sometimes shown in private presentations in Portofino or Venice. They are extraordinary—hand-painted brocade, embroidery that takes 600 hours, construction that belongs in a different century. But they are not the business. They are the image of the business, which is a different thing.

The maison's menswear has found steadier ground. The tailoring remains sharp, and the house has leaned into the codes that translate across contexts: the three-piece suit, the printed shirt, the loafer. Collaborations with Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, and Kourtney Kardashian's wedding wardrobe have kept the brand in circulation among a younger, American audience. But the collaborations also signal something. Dolce & Gabbana is no longer setting the terms. It is being invited into someone else's narrative.

The question of succession

Domenico Dolce is 65. Stefano Gabbana is 61. They have not named successors, and they have said publicly they do not intend to. The house is privately held. There is no LVMH, no Kering. There is only the two of them, and the question of what happens when they are not there.

Other houses have navigated this. Yves Saint Laurent continued after Saint Laurent stepped down in 2002. Valentino survived Valentino Garavani's retirement in 2008. But those houses were sold, restructured, handed to new creative directors who could reinterpret the archive. Dolce & Gabbana has not prepared for that. The designers are the house, and the house is the designers. The codes are so specific, so tied to a particular vision of Italian identity and sexuality, that it is not clear who else could speak them.

This is not a crisis yet. But it is a horizon.

The corset again

At the spring 2024 show in Milan, the corset returned. Black, boned, laced over a white shirt. The model wore it with a pleated skirt and flat sandals, which was new, but the corset was not new. It was the same corset from 1987, from 1995, from 2003, from every season in between.

The front row was full. The clothes were applauded. The reviews were mixed, which is to say they were the same reviews Dolce & Gabbana has received for a decade: technically accomplished, visually dense, unclear about who the customer is. But the corset does not care about the reviews. It is still there. It is still being made. And someone, somewhere, will lace it on and walk into a room and be seen exactly the way the house intended.

That is the work Dolce & Gabbana still does. Not reinvention. Not apology. Just the same language, spoken clearly, year after year, regardless of whether the world is listening the way it used to.