Where even the babies wear tiaras
COUTURE: Making ‘simple’ complicated
MILAN — “But who buys it?” This is the most frequently asked question behind the scenes of a couture show. The answers are often vague. Couture clients can be enigmatic, concealed behind veils both physical and virtual. Sometimes, the more secretive ones don’t attend the show in person but order by private appointment, having watched from their laptops. I glimpsed the outline of one Middle Eastern guest — she was mostly eclipsed by the omnipresent bulk of her beef-mountain bodyguard.
At Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda events, the clients are less evasive. There were 300 of them this year — a 50-per-cent increase from a year ago — at the Laboratori Teatro Alla Scala, the hangar-like building where Milan’s opera house constructs its costumes and sets.
Inevitably, not all of them intend to buy every time. But, once those lush gold embroidered velvet dresses, bronze-beaded opera coats and rose-spattered capes glide down the catwalk and you catch sight of your neighbours studiously texting their assigned vendeuses to reserve specific looks as they swish past, it’s hard to resist, even if starting prices hover at roughly US$75,230.
Alta Moda, like haute couture — it is one and the same, but the Italian incarnation — means each outfit is a one-off. It’s first-come, firstserved. Tension mounts as Dolce & Gabbana’s beloved arias soar on the soundtrack. By the time emotions have synchronized with the music and goals are focused, you can almost taste the competitive acquisitiveness.
To avoid disappointment, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have made their collections bigger and bigger and added ever more accessories, including delicious ruched tulle shoes and wispy feathered cloches. There were some 95 outfits — or, in fashion show parlance, looks — this time. Few could be described as daywear, by normal standards. But this is not normality. One guest wearing one of those tiny Dolce & Gabbana crowns that have become such a hit was a tot aged around 11 months.
“Yes, we are attracting younger clients,” Domenico Dolce said. “There are a lot of daughters who come with their mothers and then want to buy.”
Even though Alta Moda means weeks, perhaps even months, of delayed gratification while your piece is individually fitted to your body (or to the wooden mannequins made to your exact measurements, which live in the Dolce & Gabbana ateliers) and the extraordinary rigours of couture are undertaken. One “simple” A-line black silk dress featured short puffed sleeves composed of hundreds of organza petals. Each sleeve took a week to make.
“It’s the most complicated simple dress ever,” Dolce said.
The duo like to set themselves new impossible challenges: next season, there will be another more complicated-simple invention.
And, yes, it seems the younger crowd are prepared to wait. In return for their patience, Dolce & Gabbana are skewing some of their outfits towards a younger esthetic. The operatic ball gowns and cloaks are still there, along with other traditional Dolce & Gabbana ’50s fare, including a black satin cloque skirt suit with tulle lining and corsetry of such perfection that it too could be a candidate for “most complicated simple.”
But alongside these classic tropes were T-shirts with thick gold embroidery, blue jeans embellished with silk roses and jewels, silk-velvet pantaloons, hand-painted trainers, sable-trimmed brocade parkas and sweatshirts — although not as we’ve known them — fronted with fur.
Inevitably, the mothers will want some of this “casual” fare, too. Just as they wanted the men’s made-tomeasure, when Dolce & Gabbana introduced their Alta Sartoria two years ago. There were masculine trouser suits in the women’s show — one black, plain, a candidate for Dolce’s “complicated simple” wardrobe, the others more elaborate — Prince of Wales check with matador-inspired gold trims or claret and scattered with tubular beading.