The corset leaves the atelier in Legnano at 4pm on a Thursday
The corset leaves the atelier in Legnano at 4pm on a Thursday. By Saturday it will be on a runway in Milan, worn over a black slip and paired with a gold filigree headpiece that took another set of hands three weeks to finish. The woman who structured the boning, set the eyelets, and checked the tension across the bust works in a converted textile mill twenty-five miles north of the city. Her name is Carla Brambilla, and she has been making corsetry for Dolce & Gabbana since 1991.
You will not find her name in the show notes.
Dolce & Gabbana runs on a network of specialist ateliers scattered across Lombardy and Campania. These are not romantic backrooms staffed by one elderly tailor and his nephew. They are small-to-mid-scale workshops — ten to forty people — each with a narrow technical remit. One handles pleating. Another does smocking. A third embroiders. The house does not own them. It commissions them, season after season, the way a Savile Row cutter sends trousers to his preferred finisher.
The corset work goes to Brambilla's atelier because she can build structure into silk. Most corsetry sits over the body. Hers moulds to it, using a combination of spiral steel and nylon boning that allows the garment to move without collapsing. She learned the technique in the early eighties, working for a theatrical costumier in Brescia. Domenico Dolce found her through a mutual contact in 1990, shortly after the house's second collection. He wanted a corset that could be worn on its own, not as an undergarment. Brambilla said it would need five fittings. He gave her three. She delivered.
She now runs a team of eight. Two cut, two fit, four finish. The youngest is twenty-six. The oldest is Brambilla herself, who is sixty-one and still does all the patterning by hand. When a new corset design arrives — usually as a sketch with fabric swatches attached — she drapes it first in muslin, then in the actual cloth. Silk charmeuse behaves differently from duchesse satin, which behaves differently from a silk-cotton blend. The boning has to adjust accordingly.
Most of what she makes never reaches a runway. Dolce & Gabbana produces corsetry for private clients, for costume departments, and for the occasional red carpet appearance that requires something built rather than bought. A black lace corset worn by Monica Bellucci to Cannes in 2003 came from Brambilla's atelier. So did the gold brocade bodice Beyoncé wore on the Mrs. Carter tour. Neither piece was credited in the press.
Brambilla does not seem troubled by this. When asked, in a rare interview with Il Sole 24 Ore in 2018, whether she minded the anonymity, she said she preferred it. The work, she explained, is a conversation between her hands and the fabric. Once the garment leaves the atelier, it belongs to someone else.
The lace comes from Solstiss
Dolce & Gabbana's lace supplier is Solstiss, a French mill in Caudry that operates twenty Leavers looms, most of them over a century old. The house has worked with Solstiss since the mid-nineties, when Stefano Gabbana saw a bolt of Chantilly at a fabric fair in Lyon and ordered sixty metres on the spot. The lace now used in Dolce & Gabbana's black slip dresses, its evening gowns, and its bridal collections is made to order. Solstiss runs a minimum of 150 metres per design. The house typically orders between 300 and 500.
The looms run slowly. A metre of lace takes forty-five minutes to produce. The thread is silk, sometimes blended with nylon for strength, and it arrives on spools that are loaded by hand. Each loom requires a jacquard punchcard to set the pattern. These cards are still made using the original nineteenth-century system: a designer draws the motif, a technician translates it into a grid, and a card-puncher perforates the pattern row by row. One card can take a full day to complete.
Solstiss does not publicise its client list, but the company's director, Frédéric Delabre, has confirmed in trade press that Dolce & Gabbana accounts for roughly fifteen per cent of its annual output. That makes the house one of the mill's three largest customers, alongside Dior and Chanel.
The lace used in Dolce & Gabbana's Spring 2024 collection — a series of black cocktail dresses with floral motifs — was designed in October 2022 and woven between January and March 2023. It then travelled to a finishing atelier in Como, where it was dyed, steamed, and inspected for flaws. By the time it reached the main production facility in Legnano, it had passed through five sets of hands.
None of those hands work directly for Dolce & Gabbana.
The man who makes the shoes is not who you think
Dolce & Gabbana footwear is produced under licence by Filoblu, a Tuscan manufacturer based in Scandicci. Filoblu also makes shoes for Marni, for Jil Sander, and for a handful of smaller labels. The company operates three factories and employs around 400 people. It has been producing Dolce & Gabbana's women's shoes since 2004, when the house shifted production from a smaller atelier in Parabiago that could not scale quickly enough.
The man responsible for translating the house's sketches into wearable shoes is Marco Innocenti, Filoblu's head of development. He is fifty-three, trained at a technical school in Florence, and has worked in footwear since he was sixteen. His job is to turn a drawing — often little more than a silhouette with a few notes scribbled in the margin — into a prototype that balances the design intent with structural reality.
This is harder than it sounds. A stiletto heel drawn at 120mm often cannot support the weight of an actual foot at that height. A jewelled strap sketched across the vamp may sit too high to allow the shoe to flex. Innocenti's role is to adjust without erasing. He builds the first prototype in-house, sends it to Milan for approval, and then revises based on feedback. The process typically runs through three iterations. Sometimes it runs through six.
Once the design is locked, production moves to the factory floor. Cutting, lasting, and finishing are done by hand. A single pair of embellished pumps — the kind that appear in Dolce & Gabbana's evening collections — can take eight hours to complete. The embellishment itself is outsourced to a separate atelier in Naples, where a team of ten women applies crystals, beads, and metalwork using techniques borrowed from costume jewellery.
Innocenti's name does not appear on the shoe. Neither does Filoblu's. The insole reads 'Dolce & Gabbana Made in Italy', which is true but incomplete.
What happens next
The atelier system is not unique to Dolce & Gabbana. Most Italian houses operate this way, relying on a constellation of specialist workshops rather than centralised production. What distinguishes Dolce & Gabbana is the scale. The house produces more SKUs per season than almost any other luxury brand — over 2,000 for womenswear alone — and that volume requires a supply chain capable of absorbing constant variation.
Brambilla's atelier, for instance, does not make the same corset twice. Each season brings new fabrics, new silhouettes, new technical problems to solve. The same is true for the lace mill, the shoe factory, the embroidery workshop. They are not manufacturing a fixed product. They are interpreting a design language that shifts every six months.
This creates a strange dependency. Dolce & Gabbana needs these ateliers to execute its vision. The ateliers need Dolce & Gabbana to stay solvent. Neither side owns the other, but neither side can easily walk away.
Brambilla has been asked, more than once, whether she would ever work for another house. She says no. Not out of loyalty, exactly, but because the technical vocabulary she has built with Dolce & Gabbana over three decades does not translate elsewhere. She knows how the house drapes, how it fits, what it will and will not compromise on. Starting over with a new client would mean starting over entirely.
The corset that left Legnano on Thursday arrives in Milan on Friday morning. It is fitted, adjusted, and fitted again. By the time it reaches the runway on Saturday, it has been touched by nine people. Only two of them work for Dolce & Gabbana.