The white undershirt appears in nearly every Dolce & Gabbana show

Marcus Wright·August 17, 2026·6 min

The white undershirt appears in nearly every Dolce & Gabbana show. Not the engineered kind with a strategic neckline, but the sort a Sicilian fisherman pulls on before dawn. It sits under a black wool suit, sometimes paired with braces, always with the sleeves visible. The effect is deliberate carelessness — shirt untucked, top button undone, jacket worn like a second skin rather than armour. It's the kind of styling choice that reads as throwaway until you notice it season after season, a recurring note in a house often summarised by its loudest gestures.

Dolce & Gabbana has spent three decades being described in shorthand: Sicilian baroque, leopard print, corsetry, the DG logo rendered in gold hardware. All accurate. All insufficient. The house Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana founded in 1985 built its reputation on a specific vision of Mediterranean sensuality, but the codes that anchor that vision are quieter than the Greatest Hits reel suggests. They live in the cut of a trouser, the fall of a black slip dress, the way a jacket is left open over bare skin.

The Tailoring No One Mentions

Dolce & Gabbana's tailoring doesn't announce itself. It works in a different register to the sharp shoulders and nipped waists that dominated Italian fashion in the eighties. The house favours a longer jacket, often unstructured through the shoulder, with a three-button stance that sits higher on the torso. The effect is Old World without feeling costume-y — closer to the kind of suit a Palermo lawyer might have worn in 1963 than anything on a contemporary runway.

The trousers matter more than they should. They sit high, always. The waistband hits at the natural waist or just above, which changes the proportions of everything else. Pair that with a flat front and a straight leg that breaks once over the shoe, and you have a silhouette that recurs across menswear and womenswear alike. It's the template beneath the embellishment, the structure that holds when the sequins come off.

This approach to tailoring extends to the white shirt, which the house treats as foundational rather than basic. The collar is often worn open, sometimes with a black silk tie loosened to mid-chest. The fabric is cotton poplin or fine linen, never oxford cloth. The fit through the body is close but not tight, with enough ease to tuck and untuck without creating bulk. It's the kind of shirt that photographs well in motion, which matters when your aesthetic depends on looking like you've just walked off a boat.

The Slip Dress and What It Carries

The black slip dress entered the Dolce & Gabbana lexicon in the early nineties and never left. Not the minimalist version that Helmut Lang and Calvin Klein were showing at the same time, but something heavier, cut on the bias from silk charmeuse or satin-back crepe. The straps are thin but not delicate. The neckline is low but not plunging. The hemline falls somewhere between mid-calf and ankle, depending on the season.

What makes it a Dolce & Gabbana piece rather than a generic slip is the styling. It's worn with a bra that shows, often in black lace. Or layered under a men's blazer with the sleeves pushed up. Or paired with a gold crucifix on a long chain and flat leather sandals. The dress itself is simple. The context is everything.

This is the house's central trick: taking a garment that could pass for underwear and treating it as outerwear, then adding just enough structure or reference to pull it back from the edge. A slip dress with a corset laced over it. A bra top under a double-breasted jacket. A sheer black blouse with nothing underneath except a high-waisted trouser. The line between undressed and dressed is always visible, and Dolce & Gabbana has built a career walking it.

Lace, But Not Where You Expect It

Lace shows up in Dolce & Gabbana collections the way tweed shows up at Chanel. It's a house signature, but not always in the expected places. Yes, there are lace dresses and lace corsets and lace bralettes, but there's also lace trim on a men's vest, lace insets on a leather jacket, lace cuffs on a cotton shirt. The house treats it as a material rather than a motif, something with weight and structure rather than purely decorative value.

The lace itself is often Chantilly or a heavier guipure, sourced from Italian mills that have been producing it since before the brand existed. It's black more often than white, and it's used in panels rather than as an overlay. A black lace skirt will have an opaque silk lining that stops mid-thigh, so the lace continues alone from there to the hem. A lace blouse will be cut like a men's dress shirt, with a pointed collar and button cuffs, the transparency treated as incidental.

This approach extends to the house's use of embroidery and appliqué, which tends toward the devotional rather than the decorative. Sacred Heart motifs, crosses, Madonna imagery — the iconography of Southern Italian Catholicism rendered in thread and beadwork. It's easy to read this as kitsch, and sometimes it is, but more often it functions as a kind of visual shorthand for a specific cultural memory. The embroidery isn't there to be pretty. It's there to signal where the house is drawing from, what it's in conversation with.

The Current Proposition

Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana still design the collections, which is increasingly rare at houses of this scale. They haven't brought in a guest designer or handed creative direction to a 30-year-old with an Instagram following. The result is a house that feels oddly consistent, even as fashion around it accelerates and fragments.

Recent collections have leaned harder into the tailoring codes, particularly for men. The Spring 2024 show featured suit after suit in lightweight wool and linen, each styled with the same high-waisted trousers and open-collar shirts the house has been showing since the nineties. The palette was black, white, navy, cream. The only pattern was a discreet pinstripe. It was, by Dolce & Gabbana standards, almost austere.

The womenswear has moved in a similar direction, though the house can't resist a corset or a lace panel. But even there, the most interesting pieces are the simplest: a black wool pencil skirt cut to sit at the natural waist, a white cotton blouse with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, a slip dress in charcoal silk worn with flat sandals. These aren't the pieces that close the show or appear in the ad campaign, but they're the ones that clarify what the house is actually about when the spectacle quiets down.

What Remains

There's a photograph from a 1990 campaign, shot by Ferdinando Scianna, that shows a model in a black slip dress and a man's white undershirt, standing in a doorway in Sicily. Her hair is undone. The dress is wrinkled. The light is hard and direct. It's the kind of image that could have been taken yesterday, which is both the strength and the limitation of Dolce & Gabbana's approach.

The house has never been interested in reinvention. It found a language in the late eighties — drawn from Italian cinema, Catholic iconography, and the particular way people dressed in Southern Italy before globalisation smoothed out regional difference — and it has spent 35 years refining that language rather than replacing it. The risk is irrelevance. The reward is clarity.

Walk into a Dolce & Gabbana store now and you'll find the same codes: the high-waisted trousers, the black slip dress, the unstructured blazer, the lace that shows up where you don't expect it. They're not trying to convince you the future looks like Sicily in 1955. They're suggesting that some proportion and some gestures don't need updating, that there's a version of dressing that sits outside trend cycles because it was never fully inside them to begin with.