The corset is still there
The corset is still there. Black, boned, worn over a white shirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbow. It appeared in Milan this past September on a model walking through a set dressed as a Sicilian courtyard, and it looked like the same corset from 1992, which is more or less the point. Dolce & Gabbana has spent three decades returning to the same silhouette, the same iconography, the same Mediterranean fantasy. The question now is whether that consistency reads as conviction or as repetition.
Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana founded their house in 1985, showing their first collection in a Milan showroom with ten looks and no budget for a runway. The aesthetic was immediate: southern Italian codes filtered through northern tailoring, lingerie worn as outerwear, lace over denim, gold over black. By the mid-nineties they had refined the formula into something both highly specific and endlessly repeatable. The references were clear—Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, the visual language of Sicilian widows and madonnas—and the execution was unambiguous. A Dolce & Gabbana dress announced itself.
That decade gave the house its architecture. The corset, the rose print, the leopard, the black lace veil. These were not seasonal gestures. They became the house codes, returned to each year with minor variations. Madonna wore the gold cone bra for the Blond Ambition tour in 1990, designed by Jean Paul Gaultier but spiritually aligned with what Dolce & Gabbana were building. By 1995, they were dressing her themselves. The house understood celebrity as both client and collaborator, and the nineties supermodel era gave them a stage. Naomi Campbell closed their shows. Monica Bellucci became a house muse. The clothes were designed to be seen, and they were.
The apparatus
Dolce & Gabbana is not a small house. The business spans ready-to-wear, alta moda (their couture line, launched in 2012), alta gioielleria, men's tailoring, childrenswear, beauty, home, and an expanding hospitality vertical that includes restaurants and branded collaborations with hotels. Revenue in 2023 was reported at approximately €1.9 billion, a recovery from the dip following the controversies of 2018 and 2019. The Chinese market, which contracted sharply after a poorly received ad campaign, has not fully returned, but growth in Europe and the Middle East has compensated.
The house is still owned entirely by its founders. There is no LVMH, no Kering, no external board. Dolce handles the atelier work; Gabbana oversees image and communication. This structure allows for both freedom and insularity. There is no one to overrule a decision, and there is no one to suggest a different direction. The result is a house that operates with total internal consistency and occasional tone-deafness to the world outside.
The controversies are part of the record. The 2018 Shanghai show was cancelled after the campaign videos were widely criticised as reductive and culturally insensitive. Gabbana's private messages, leaked during the fallout, made the situation worse. Boycotts followed. Major Chinese retailers pulled the brand. The financial impact was significant, and the reputational impact was worse. The designers issued apologies, but the language was careful, and the apologies did not include a structural reckoning with how the house communicates.
Since then, Dolce & Gabbana has leaned harder into its core audience: clients who want maximalism, who want ornament, who are not particularly interested in the discourse around cultural sensitivity or the politics of representation. The clothes have not become quieter. If anything, they have become more insistent.
The collections now
The spring 2025 women's collection, shown in September, opened with white lace and closed with gold brocade. In between: corsets, bustiers, high-waisted trousers, bra tops under tailored blazers, rose prints, leopard prints, more lace. The set was a constructed Sicilian street, complete with balconies and laundry lines. The casting included models in their forties and fifties alongside the younger faces, which the house has framed as a celebration of Italian beauty across ages. The execution was technically accomplished. The embroidery was dense, the tailoring sharp. It looked like Dolce & Gabbana.
The men's collections follow a parallel logic. Sicilian codes translated into three-piece suits, printed shirts, gold jewellery, and an ongoing collaboration with Kim Kardashian's Skims that produced logo underwear and loungewear. The house has embraced streetwear adjacency without abandoning its core tailoring. The result is a range that can dress a man for a wedding in Palermo or a club in Dubai, often in the same look.
Alta moda, the couture line, is where the house operates without commercial constraint. These are one-of-a-kind pieces shown in locations like Venice, Portofino, and Siracusa, often timed to multi-day events that double as client experiences. The clothes are ornate to the point of baroque: hand-painted silk, jewel embroidery, trains that require two assistants. The audience is small, wealthy, and geographically dispersed. This is not fashion for editors. It is fashion for clients who want to be the only person in the room wearing that dress, and who can pay for the privilege.
The house has also expanded into what it calls "lifestyle." Dolce & Gabbana Casa offers furniture, tableware, and decorative objects in the same maximalist vocabulary as the clothes. There are branded cafés in Milan and collaborations with appliance manufacturers. A refrigerator painted with Sicilian cart motifs retails for over €40,000. These are not ironic products. The house is building a total world, and it is doing so without apology.
Where it stands
Dolce & Gabbana occupies a specific position in the current landscape. It is not part of the minimalist turn that has shaped much of the past five years. It is not interested in quiet luxury or stealth wealth. The house makes clothes for people who want to be seen, and it makes them with the assumption that ornament is not a problem to be solved but a language to be spoken fluently.
This is both a strength and a limitation. The house has a clear identity, which is rare. But that identity is also inflexible. The same motifs appear season after season, and while the house frames this as consistency, it can also read as stasis. There is little sense of evolution, little interest in engaging with the broader conversations around sustainability, labor, or representation that have reshaped parts of the industry. Dolce & Gabbana makes beautiful objects, but it does not seem particularly interested in interrogating what those objects mean or who they are for beyond the client who can afford them.
The financial recovery suggests that this approach has an audience. The house is not struggling. But it is also not expanding its cultural reach. The younger generation of consumers who drive much of the conversation around fashion are largely not talking about Dolce & Gabbana, except as a reference point for a previous era. The brand's social media presence is robust, but the engagement skews older and more geographically specific.
The question is whether that matters. Dolce & Gabbana has never positioned itself as a house for everyone. It is not trying to be Bottega Veneta or The Row. It is not interested in the kind of understated codes that dominate editorial right now. The house makes clothes for a fantasy of Italy that may or may not exist, and it makes them for people who want to live inside that fantasy, at least for an evening.
The corset, again
At the end of the September show, the finale looked like the opening: corsets, white shirts, black trousers. The models walked in a line, and the casting was multigenerational, which gave the procession a strange weight. It was not about youth. It was about a specific vision of femininity, one that has been out of fashion and back in fashion several times since 1985, and that Dolce & Gabbana has simply continued to make regardless.
The applause was warm. The clients in the front row were already thinking about orders. And the corset, boned and laced and unmistakably Dolce & Gabbana, walked off the runway and into another season. It has been walking for forty years. It will likely walk for forty more.
