Milan was cold and foggy, and although it was still midafternoon when I arrived outside the Dolce & Gabbana showroom, at 7 Via Santa Cecilia, the January day was already growing dark. The city had been under a blanket of subalpine fog for days, and the air was brown and felt gluey, as though the mist and trapped smog were congealing.
This was the last of three days of fittings for the Dolce & Gabbana winter, 2005, men’s show, which would be staged the following afternoon, in the courtyard next to the showroom. It was to be a big show, with eighty-six outfits, or “exits,” to be worn by sixty models. Several dozen of those models were occupying the floor of the cramped lobby area at 7 Santa Cecilia, huddled so close to one another that it was necessary to thread a path through them in order to reach the receptionist’s desk. Many wore headphones, and their heads were bobbing gently. They looked serious and introspective, as though they were psyching themselves up for the big game.
Upstairs in a large, high-ceilinged atelier, a short bald man was busily, almost manically, fitting the models with the clothes they would wear in the show, one at a time. A row of pins was stuck into the front of his left trouser leg, and the handle of a pair of scissors protruded from his right front pocket. This was Domenico Dolce, the forty-six-year-old part owner of Dolce & Gabbana. His posture was peculiar to tailors around the world—a sort of crouch that permits the hands to range from the trouser hems to the waistband to the shoulders and collar with a minimum of additional bending and reaching. The hands were working over the garments in a blur, pinning, stitching, nipping and tucking, and always finishing with a little pat. As the hands worked, the legs described tight circles around the standing model, sometimes moving forward, sometimes backward. The models towered over Dolce, their heads far removed from the whirl of tailoring going on below.
Sitting languidly on the other side of the room, ignoring Dolce, was a tall man in camouflage pants and an olive-green V-necked sweater, worn over a navy-blue collared shirt. His clothes had the casual appearance that is often the result of careful calculation. He was thin and deeply tanned, and had a heavy-lidded expression that was not tired or bored, exactly, but profoundly listless. This was Stefano Gabbana, Dolce’s forty-two-year-old partner. When he rested his forehead in his hand, a small tattooed cross could be seen on the back of his neck, emerging above his shirt collar, part of a more elaborate tattoo below.
The designers had been working on this collection since August. Dolce does almost all of the tailoring, first sketching the outfits, and then slowly building up prototypes in muslin, on dozens of mannequins around his studio. Gabbana helps with selecting the fabric and deciding on the over-all feeling of a collection, but his essential contribution to the creative process doesn’t come into play until the fittings start. Gabbana’s expertise lies not in the making but in the judging of an outfit, and his work is performed in an instant—that instant in which an outfit makes its impression. He is the eyes for Dolce’s hands. Now the eyes looked starved; they seemed to require regular servings of fresh imagery to keep them animated. It was as though denial were sharpening their appetite for the moment when, at a signal from Dolce, they would be turned loose on the outfit.
Dolce and Gabbana sound like their clothes. They talk about their work in the same way they do it. Dolce starts a point, Gabbana embroiders the facts with color, spinning the anecdotes out, and then Dolce rounds the discussion off with a nip and a tuck.
Gabbana: “I like clothes, but not so much to touch them. I don’t want to spend too much time on one pair of clothes.”
Dolce: “He has a very quick eye.”
Gabbana: “I have to like the image, then I just want to move on. Domenico is a perfectionist.”
Dolce: “I like to feel the clothes.”
The sartorial dimension of that conversation was evident in the eighty-six outfits hanging on movable metal racks around three sides of the room, next to their respective accessories, which were neatly packaged in slim clear plastic bags, like kids’ snacks. There were the dark conservative suits and overcoats of Dolce’s Sicilian heritage, and there was also a fox-fur coat with patchwork camouflage details—a look that was decidedly more Gabbana. There were thirteen kinds of jeans in the collection: denim is the fabric in which the designers’ diverse personalities are most successfully reconciled. The jeans had splashes of paint, studs, snakeskin inserts, and embroidery, and were worn and abraded in a variety of ways. Indeed, the exquisite distressing of the fabric is almost as time-consuming and costly as the embroidering of it; workers make most of the holes by hand, cutting the denim with knives and rubbing it with pumice stones. But, no matter how ornamental the jeans are, they all fit in the same classic, unflashy way. For Dolce & Gabbana, the impulse toward excess is always straining against the boundaries of good tailoring.
Dolce and Gabbana are becoming to the two-thousands what Prada was to the nineteen-nineties and Armani was to the nineteen-eighties—gli stilisti whose sensibility defines the decade. In 2003, the designers sold more products in Italy—clothes, sunglasses, perfume, underwear, watches, jewelry—than any other fashion house. And although the house is still only half the size of Armani in worldwide sales, it is catching up fast. (Last year, the company passed Versace in total sales.) Dolce & Gabbana is the anti-Armani. Giorgio Armani discovered a way of exporting a distinctively Italian style—the sleek, gray-toned aesthetic of Italian industrial design—to America by linking it to cinematic notions of glamour. In doing so, he taught Hollywood how to dress Italian. Dolce and Gabbana absorbed this triumph and, a decade later, reversed it: they taught Italians how to look Hollywood.
It would be hard to gauge Dolce & Gabbana’s contribution to fashion history by pointing to a silhouette or a form the designers have changed, or a fabric they have pioneered. In their women’s clothes, they have always favored the full-figured woman over the skinny, mannish silhouettes of minimalists such as Prada, Jil Sander, and Helmut Lang, but this is hardly revolutionary. Perhaps the best place to see their influence is on the sidewalks of any Italian city—low-slung flared jeans that drag on the pavement, worn with a studded belt, a knitted skullcap, sunglasses, and jewelry, underwear showing above the waistband. Their look is as much about attitude as about clothes—pants with lots of pockets, buttons, and zippers, plus a drawstring and some dangling straps, buckles, studs, and large metallic logos. (You don’t want to get stuck behind a Dolce & Gabbana fan when going through an airport metal detector.) These are clothes to brighten listless glances.
"D’accordo,” Dolce called out, and that was Gabbana’s signal to look. His eyes inhaled the outfit. He unfolded his long limbs and rose from his chair. If he didn’t like something, he would say “No” immediately. Dolce rarely argued, and, if he tried, Gabbana would wag his finger and shake his head, and say “No” again.
This time the verdict was “Sì.” The model was wearing jeans, a belt with a big “DG” logo on the buckle, and no shirt. Gabbana walked around behind him, nodding approvingly at the fit. Then he scooped a few pieces of jewelry from the baskets of bling that were on a table behind him and draped them over the model’s chest.
“Perfetto,” Gabbana said, and sat down to await the next model.
Unlike the Guccis, Pradas, Puccis, Zegnas, Ferragamos, and Fendis, Dolce and Gabbana do not come from families with long pedigrees in the production and sale of luxury goods—one of those families which occupy quasi-noble status within the Italian fashion hierarchy. They began as outsiders, with their noses pressed to the windows of the fashion world. Their business and their distinctive style are based not so much on family history and artisanal traditions as on their relationship with each other. And the only reason that Dolce and Gabbana are creative and business partners at all is that they were romantic partners first.
Dolce was born in 1958, and grew up in the town of Polizzi Generosa, near Palermo, in Sicily. His father, Saverio, was a sarto—a tailor—and his mother, Sara, sold fabric and clothing in the local emporium. His father made clothes for both men and women, for all occasions, from the heavy woollen coats worn by the gentry when on horseback to the black velvet peasant caps worn by their estate workers. He also made a wide variety of undergarments, from men’s sleeveless T-shirts to women’s bras, girdles, corsets, and petticoats. If there was a wedding in town, he would make the dress for the bride and the suits for the groomsmen. Seasons in the Dolce household were marked by the weights of the fabrics that the family worked with: linen for summer; velvet, gabardine, and light wool for fall; heavy wool for winter; cotton for spring. In all Dolce’s memories of his youth, he always sees weather and fabric together: the way the light looked on the cloth. At night, the clothes that his father was working on hung from overhead racks in his shop, and they loomed large in the boy’s imagination.
Dolce: “I made my own pants when I was six years old.”
Gabbana: “Like for a doll.”
Dolce: “I make all the clothes in my father’s shop.”
Gabbana: “You see? He is a genius. I am not like him.”
Gabbana was born in Milan in 1962. His father worked in a printing factory, and his mother ironed for a laundry service.
Gabbana: “Fashion and luxury were not what my family talked about at home. The only designer I care about was Fiorucci.”
Dolce: “Who wasn’t even a designer.”
Gabbana: “More like a graphic artist who works in clothes.”
Dolce: “A style-maker.”
Gabbana: “I didn’t know!”
Gabbana’s main interests as a teen-ager were “pop music, going dancing, riding my motorino around, and acting crazy. I wore a Lacoste shirt, Levi’s, and Ray-Bans, the original green ones with gold frames, and boots with a square toe, but not Frye. And I have lovers,” he added gravely. “Many lofers.” (I thought for a moment he meant “loafers,” and wondered how many pairs a guy can have.) Gabbana’s memories are a dazzle of color, light, and speed—life as seen from the saddle of a motorino. (He still rides a motorino around Milan, and you can often spot it—it’s the one painted in leopard print—parked on the sidewalk of Via Goldoni, outside the company’s magnificent glass-sheathed office building.) He studied graphic design in high school but wasn’t much of a student, and on completing his studies he needed a job. A friend suggested the fashion business.
This was the early eighties, the dawn of the Italian-designer-ready-to-wear era. In 1982, Giorgio Armani was on the cover of Time, partly as a result of the success of the film “American Gigolo,” in which Richard Gere could be seen on movie screens cavorting in Armani while Deborah Harry sang “Roll me in designer sheets, I’ll never get enough.”
Dolce was already in Milan. He had enrolled in a three-year course in fashion design at the Marangoni Institute but dropped out after four months, because he realized that he already knew everything the school had to teach. His dream was to work for Armani, whom he had never met. One day, without making an appointment, he carried his book of sketches over to Armani’s headquarters, on Via Durini. Inside the door, there was a long white carpet leading to the receptionist’s desk. Dolce wasn’t sure if he should walk on it with his shoes on.“I am such a cretino,” he says. “I know nothing.” He decided that he would look ridiculous appearing at the front desk without shoes, so he approached by sidling along the wall, where he could step without sullying the carpet. He doesn’t know if Armani ever saw the sketches.
Dolce found a job as an assistant to a designer named Giorgio Correggiari. One night at a club, he met a kid named Gabbana. Dolce, quiet and shy, was impressed with Gabbana’s good looks and outgoing personality; Gabbana wasn’t so taken with Dolce, but he was happy to hear his advice on how to approach Correggiari for a job. Correggiari ended up hiring Gabbana to work on sportswear, and Dolce taught him how to sketch and the basics of tailoring, and in the process they became a couple. By 1983, they had parted ways with Correggiari and were living together in a one-room loft in Milan. The room had a round, wobbly wooden table in the middle, and they would sketch sitting across from each other. If one erased too hard, the table would jiggle and spoil the other’s line.
Dolce: “We always filed two different invoices for the freelance work we did, even when we were working for the same client.”
Gabbana: “Our accountant said, ‘Why not just do one invoice for both of you? Put Dolce and Gabbana at the top.’ ”
So the brand was born, the brainchild of a Milanese bookkeeper.
In 1985, Dolce & Gabbana was one of six new talents chosen to design pieces for the Milan shows. As a result, the designers were able to persuade a factory in Piedmont to make the clothes for their own collection.
Dolce: “I am getting up at five to do the three-hour drive, then drive back at night.”
Gabbana: “Because I don’t like to stay in hotels.”
Dolce: “So we went back and forth. In this little car. We were so young.”
Gabbana: “You don’t think then. You are very naïve, and everything is spontaneous.”
That collection, called “Real Women,” débuted in March, 1986. There were stretchy black jersey dresses with flowing toile sleeves and shawls. The clothes were weirdly funereal and sexy at the same time. The press liked the line, but it didn’t sell. Gabbana wrote a letter to the fabric supplier, cancelling their order for the next collection, and, feeling defeated, the couple went to stay with Dolce’s family in Sicily for the Christmas holiday. There, Saverio Dolce offered them the money to pay for that collection. It was too late, Gabbana told him, because they had already cancelled the fabric order. But the letter to the supplier had been lost in the mail, and the fabric was waiting for them when they returned to Milan.
On that same trip to Sicily, Dolce had seen a billboard in Palermo that showed a black-and-white photograph of a woman in a shawl, with her head down, in a sorrowful attitude. He couldn’t get the image out of his mind. He found out that the photographer’s name was Ferdinando Scianna, an Italian photojournalist known for his neorealist depictions of Sicily. Dolce asked him if he would photograph their clothes. Scianna refused, saying that he wasn’t a fashion photographer. But because he was Sicilian the designers eventually persuaded him to come to Sicily with the model Marpessa, a quiet, introverted beauty, who, wearing no makeup, posed among fishermen and fruit sellers and old ladies, in grittily realistic surroundings that recalled the aftermath of an earthquake. Only later did the designers discover that Scianna had not, in fact, shot the photograph that Dolce had seen in Palermo—a photographer named Letizia Battaglia had taken it. Like so many of the best things about Dolce & Gabbana, the campaign was an accident.
Scianna’s early advertising images were at least as important in introducing Dolce & Gabbana to the public as the clothes themselves. One could argue that Dolce & Gabbana established itself with the public mainly through advertising, rather than relying on the approval of the fashion press. However, while Scianna’s photographs gave the brand an identity that Italians could relate to, it was too Mediterranean to capture a wide audience outside Italy. Seeking to broaden their appeal without losing touch with their Italian roots, the designers began appropriating imagery from neorealist Italian cinema. Scenes from classic films by Rossellini, Fellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Pasolini, and Visconti, as well as from movies featuring Totò, an Italian comedian, were interpreted by the most prominent commercial photographers and models of the nineties. These images allowed customers to feel that they were buying costumes for a “Dolce Vita” fantasy of their own. The idea wasn’t particularly subtle, but it was effective.
Without Dolce’s tailoring abilities, and his sense of propriety, bred in the provinces, the company wouldn’t have had a chance. But, without Gabbana’s urban freedom from those same restraints of taste and tailoring, the company could not have become the phenomenon that it is today. By the end of the nineteen-eighties, the designers’ good Catholic girl was showing more and more of her underwear, and by the early nineteen-nineties that underwear was leopard print, which became a Dolce & Gabbana trademark. Leopard print allowed the designers to combine the naughtiness of the boudoir with the baroque formality of the Sicilian aristocracy. But, with Dolce pushing Gabbana toward elegance, the line also began to develop a kind of ecclesiastical finery; these were clothes for women who wanted to feel like a papal nuncio. The men’s line began in 1990, and represented a return to the company’s more conservative roots; Dolce has always been more in control of the men’s clothes. On the other hand, in a younger line, D&G, for men and women, which débuted in 1994, the Gabbanian impulse toward excess was given free rein.
With the changing nature of the designers’ collaboration, the ideal Dolce & Gabbana woman evolved from Anna Magnani in Rossellini’s “Roma, Città Aperta” (a modest but powerful mother figure, in dark, layered clothes, with lots of skirts and sweaters, and somewhat unbuttoned blouses), to Sophia Loren performing a striptease for Marcello Mastroianni in De Sica’s “Ieri, Oggi, Domani” (bras, corsets, and other undergarments from the rafters of Saverio Dolce’s shop have been reimagined and transformed into outer garments), to Madonna, who wore a Dolce & Gabbana beaded corset at the première of “In Bed with Madonna,” in 1991. Madonna translated Dolce & Gabbana for the masses. The designers created more than fifteen hundred costumes for Madonna’s Girlie Show Tour, in 1993, and, more recently, designed the white cowgirl outfit for her “Music” video. Nowadays, the ideal woman is Monica Bellucci, a bellissima Italian actress who always seems to be weeping in her films, and who is the subject of the director Giuseppe Tornatore’s short film for the company’s fragrance, Sicily. (The ideal Dolce & Gabbana man never strays far from the soccer field.)
Almost two thousand people work at Dolce & Gabbana. The business is still entirely owned by the two designers. In 2002, Gabriella Forte, the former head of Calvin Klein, was brought in to oversee the North American market, which is just a sixth the size of the company’s combined European sales. In recent years, both Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton and the Gucci Group have offered to buy Dolce & Gabbana. “What, do we need more mahney?” says Gabbana, apropos of those offers, rubbing his fingertips together. Apparently, they do not. In addition to their apartments and offices in Milan, the designers have houses in Monte Carlo and Stromboli, and they recently bought L’Olivetta, a villa in Portofino which Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had reportedly tried to purchase.
But success has come at a price—Dolce & Gabbana is no longer Dolce and Gabbana. The relationship on which the business was based ended two years ago, although the designers have publicly acknowledged the breakup only recently. They continue to own their homes together, but they now have different boyfriends; the two couples often travel together. They live in separate apartments in the same building in Milan, across the street from where they work.
Because so much of the unique appeal of Dolce & Gabbana rests on the unlikely union of the two designers’ personalities, one has to wonder whether their business can survive the breakup.
Gabbana: “At first, I just wanted to leave. Just leave. But let’s face it—I am not stupid. So I stayed. Little by little, we become friends again, and learn to have a relationship again, though obviously not like before.”
Dolce: “We know each other very well. This is real love, when you get to know the person behind the person.”
Gabbana: “We were together for nineteen years, night and day—it’s like forty-five years, for most people.”
"Look at this boy,” Gabbana was saying now to Dolce, studying the head shot of the next model to be called up for a fitting. “Look at his face.” With his fingers, Gabbana drew a circle in the air around the face. “He is a beautiful boy, no?”
Dolce shrugged and said, “Sì, beautiful.” He walked back to the fitting area, to await the boy’s arrival.
It was past five by now. Only a few models remained to be fitted, but the process had dragged on longer than expected, and the designers had work left to do on the women’s “pre-collection”—the line they make for the buyers, before the runway show at the end of February. And there were also fittings to be completed for the D&G men’s show, which would be staged two days after the Dolce & Gabbana show. One could sense the burden of all the looks still to process, stacked up like incoming aircraft waiting to land.
Gabbana: “When we started, we were a two-million-lira company. Now we are—”
Dolce: “Almost a one-billion-euro company.”
Gabbana: “Wholesale. We didn’t have much money, so we had to do everything in stages.”
Dolce: “One thing at a time.”
Gabbana: “Now we have to do everything at once. Because that is what the customer wants.”
Gabbana’s cell phone rang, and he walked to the other end of the big room to talk privately. He had recently finished taping ten new episodes of a dating reality show called “La Sottile Linea Rosa,” or “The Thin Pink Line,” an Italian Fox variation of an English series called “Straight Dates for Gay Mates.” In the show, Gabbana plays the fairy godfather who drops in from time to time with fashion advice. (“With a body like that, a black sheath. It looks good on me, just imagine how it will look on her.”) He can be seen holding a magic wand, sitting in front of dozens of burning candles of different lengths, with leopard-print wallpaper in the background.
Dolce didn’t want to participate in the show, and the venture, coming at a time when they were separating, seemed to signal a break in their creative interests as well, but Gabbana did it anyway. Gabbana, for his part, says that he is interested in exploring other acting opportunities.
Gabbana returned as the beautiful boy, an American, was shown into the room. The model smiled, said “How’s it going?” to Dolce, and immediately removed his trousers. An assistant handed him some Dolce & Gabbana underwear to put over his briefs, and then he slipped on a chocolate-and-cream-colored tracksuit.
The tracksuit was part of a relatively new addition to the Dolce & Gabbana line: luxury clothes for the gym. Several years ago, Dolce started going to a gym in the evenings, after work. He had never been sporty, like Gabbana, who told me, “I do track and field, including pole-vaulting, in high school. Also basket, swim, and volley.” The world of working out was new to Dolce, and represented a more solitary existence, but he was impressed by how well dressed the men in the gym were—much better dressed than the women, who looked “awful,” he thought.
But fitting the tracksuit seemed to perplex Dolce. He kept fussing with the waist, adjusting exactly where the pants fell on the model’s “Adonis belt”—the muscles that curl down on either side of the abdominals. He tried hemming the pants, but that didn’t seem to satisfy him, either. He squatted at the model’s feet, holding the hem between his fingers, his temples twitching with concentration.
When I left, they were still at it. Outside, night had fallen, but the smog had lifted, and the air had a sugary scent of snow. ♦