The Great Fashion Designers (41 page)

Dolce & Gabbana staged their first show in October 1985 as part of a group showing for three young designer labels at the back end of the Milan show season. Despite avoiding the power dressing that was dominant in fashion at the time, their complicated geometric cuts received encouraging press coverage. But their manufacturer took fright and promptly pulled out. The duo appeared to be out of business before they had even started. Dolce's family came to the rescue, producing a second collection for the two young designers. It was named Real Women, not least because they could not afford models and had to enlist friends to model the clothes. The collection was full of fabrics used in unconventional ways, including a coat made out of sweatshirting and a dress in a rubberised wool. The beginnings of a buzz began to ripple through the Milanese fashion scene. By the third collection, for spring/summer 1987, store buyers were showing interest, even if the versatile clothes, which could be worn in two or more different ways, were not easy to explain to customers. Was it a skirt or a dress? In fact, it was both. Dolce & Gabbana were also drawing on the innovative brilliance of Italy's textile manufacturers, working with such new fabrics as stretch silk and a transparent organza jersey.

Up until their fourth collection, Dolce had resisted drawing on his Sicilian roots for inspiration. ‘I'd come to Milan because I wanted to break from the past,' he explained. ‘I dreamed modern! I resisted going back there.' Gabbana, by contrast, had no such qualms. For a photo shoot, he persuaded a non-fashion photographer, Fernando Scianna, to join them in Sicily with the model Marpesa to produce moody black-and-white images that had an authentic aura of Sicily. Black and white paid homage to the Italian cinema of the 1940s, when neorealist directors such as Roberto Rossellini produced gritty movies set in the Deep South. Another key influence was Visconti, whose film
The Leopard
was the inspiration behind the designers' spring/summer 1988 collection. All this was laced with erotic elements, as academic Barbara Vinken has noted: ‘There is a touch of Sicilian passion, in the manner of Sophia Loren: an affirmative, even aggressive feminine eroticism, adult and dominant.'

Curiously, British and American store buyers were quicker to appreciate Dolce & Gabbana than the Italians. From Rossellini to Sophia Loren to Anna Magnani, all the great icons of twentieth-century Italian popular culture were referenced by the two designers. Their models, ranging from Isabella Rossellini (daughter of Roberto) to Linda Evangelista (of Canadian Italian parentage), were chosen for their Italian spirit. Rossellini recalled: ‘The first piece of theirs that I wore was a white shirt, cut in such a way that my breasts appeared to be exploding.' It was, perhaps, all too much for their countrymen and women. As Dolce acknowledged, ‘At first, Dolce & Gabbana were too Italian for the Italians.' In truth, Dolce & Gabbana have looked as much to Britain as to Italy for creative ideas. ‘Italy has too much culture, too much history about clothes, and sometimes this is negative because they care too much,' said Gabbana in 2000. ‘They have no humour about it. The English have humour. We take inspiration from London all the time.'

The early 1990s—the era of the supermodels—saw any doubts about the talents of the duo swept aside worldwide. Reacting against the constraints of feminism, powerful, successful women were more prepared to celebrate their sexuality. Dolce & Gabbana delivered the fashion to match, creating lavish beaded and embroidered corsets and bras festooned with Swarovski stones. The pop star Madonna became a fan, customer and friend. Photographer Steven Meisel and supermodel
Linda Evangelista produced memorable images for the Dolce & Gabbana advertising campaigns that somehow pulled off the difficult trick of being romantic, nostalgic, modern and relevant all at once.

From meagre beginnings, the business flourished. While many other designers of the 1980s and 1990s soared only to crash and burn within double-quick time, Dolce & Gabbana sustained momentum. They were blessed with reliable production, signing an agreement in 1988 with Dolce Saverio, the clothing firm based in Legnano, near Milan, and owned by Dolce's family. Two years later, a menswear line was launched to instant acclaim, drawing unapologetically on the comfortable shapes and easy style of Sicilian men's tailoring. For four years in the early 1990s, the designers also worked as consultants on Complice, a collection produced by Genny, a deal that gave them further financial strength. A series of licensing deals followed, including a women's fragrance in 1991, a men's underwear collection in 1993 and the D&G younger line in 1994.

The Dolce & Gabbana homage to Italy was rarely subtle: the spring collection of 1993 featured trouser suits with photo prints of
The Birth of Venus
, the Renaissance masterpiece by Sandro Botticelli. Season after season, the styling was brash, exuberant and celebratory. At a time when many designers were opting for minimalism and an austere vision, Dolce & Gabbana were like a breath of fresh air. In 1997, the designers decided to show their collections in their palazzo rather than on a conventional runway. As the craftsmanship in their collections became more pronounced, drawing on Italy's craft traditions that still flourished (in contrast to elsewhere in Europe), they decided to bring the collection closer to the audience: they wanted people to see the clothes. When the minimalist wave in fashion finally burned out, Dolce & Gabbana were well positioned to welcome back maximalism. The collections of the turn of the century saw them go ‘totally crazy', to quote the designers themselves. Brazilian Gisele Bündchen was their favourite new model, dressed in patchwork jeans or lace miniskirts for the autumn/winter 1999/2000 collection.

That the two designers, working and living in tandem, remained lovers as well as partners for around nineteen years of their label's existence was some achievement. The full story of their relationship is unlikely to be told, although they acknowledged the pressures, admitting in their twentieth anniversary book that their collection for spring/summer 1999, focusing on fabric innovation, was an explosive period in their partnership. Their personal relationship was under profound strain, although the final announcement of their separation did not come until 2005. ‘We have a different type of pillow-talk now,' Gabbana said in typically direct fashion, while emphasising that the business was unaffected. ‘While we are not in love any more, we are very much in love with our business.' It is true that their comments about each other over the years are based on an extraordinary degree of mutual professional and personal admiration (although when Gabbana once bought a YSL coat, Dolce refused to speak to him for days).

The two designers marked a strong shift in direction with their collection for spring/summer 2008, sending out a series of tulle gowns hand-painted with beautiful floral designs. The designers announced they were moving away from their overtly sexual signature style towards a more sensual approach. The dimensions of the mannequin form on which they designed were changed, Dolce said in an interview with
The New York Times:
the bust size reduced, the waist elongated and the hips enlarged. Indeed, just at the point when the pair were in danger of becoming a pastiche of themselves, they found a new lease of life. For autumn/winter 2008, they explored masculine English tailoring; for the following spring/summer, baroque brocades came to the fore. Once again, fashion editors, buyers and high street copyists paid close attention.

Their advertising campaigns still retain a provocative streak: one advertisement was withdrawn from Spain in 2007 after government representatives claimed it encouraged violence against women. The designers expressed bemusement. ‘We play sometimes and we love sexuality,' said Gabbana, possibly with a twinkle in his eye. ‘We take a risk. People say it is too much, but it depends on the eye.' Dolce & Gabbana have played the modern fashion game better than most: sales totalling $1.4 billion in 2007 make that clear. Although their relentless plundering
of the styles of the past can sometimes create a sensation of ennui even for their most loyal enthusiasts, their energetic ability to reinvent themselves is likely to keep them in the front line of fashion for some time to come.

Further reading:
Dolce & Gabbana published books to mark both their tenth and twentieth anniversaries. The latter,
20 Years Dolce & Gabbana
(2005), includes a well-written text by Sarah Mower that exhaustively documents their collections.

British designer John Galliano is arguably the greatest of a steady stream of talents who have emerged from London's Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design since the 1980s. He was the first British designer of the modern era to head a Parisian haute couture house. He has consistently taken fashion shows to new heights of theatricality, most notably for the house of Christian Dior, where his shows are of unequalled extravagance, displaying fantastical imagination. Galliano brought back romance to fashion in 1997 when he became chief designer at Christian Dior, fifty years on from the launch of Dior's New Look.

To his critics, his clothes can veer close to costume, bearing little relation to the modern-day world (and often with no connection to the showroom range sold to buyers). But the fashion show is, for him, a theatre, where the imagination should roam. His meticulously themed collections, often inspired by complex fictional tales with a heroine at the centre, have unashamedly pursued flights of fancy. Over the years, he has produced many complex, difficult-to-wear, unforgiving clothes that have delighted fashion editors although less so store buyers and customers. But, thanks to his romantic spirit and personal charm, he has ridden a surf of goodwill—and in the process created some of the most beautiful clothes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His willingness to experiment has inspired a generation of young designers. Even as a college student, he had an obsessive curiosity, a desire to push ideas to their limits. Early in his career, for example, he devised his own form of cutting in the round so that sleeves followed the shapes of the arm and jackets turned into curvy sculptures. Invariably he cuts fabric on the bias, so that it clings to the body. ‘It's a sensuous way of cutting, very fast and fluid, with a great respect for women's bodies,' he told Roger Tredre in 1990. ‘It's like oily water running through your fingers.'

Juan Carlos Antonio Galliano was born in Gibraltar in 1960 to a Spanish mother and Gibraltarian father, moving to London as a child. He joined Saint Martins before its merger with Central when it was still known as St Martin's School of Art. Among the lecturers was the fashion writer Colin McDowell, who later became his biographer. Galliano researched his collections intensively, spending hours in the library of the Victoria & Albert Museum building up a meticulous picture of an imaginary heroine who would be the true muse of each collection. Multilayered stories were created that fed directly into the design process. The theatricality of Galliano's approach to fashion might be traced to his student days: he worked as a dresser at London's National Theatre and frequented a nightclub called Taboo where his friends included Leigh Bowery, the flamboyant Australian costume designer and living artwork, and Stephen Jones, the milliner and a long-term collaborator.

Galliano's initial rise was meteoric. The 1984 graduation collection, Les Incroyables, inspired by the costumes of the French Revolution period, was famously bought by London designer store Browns, and the young designer was inundated with interview requests by fashion editors. Commenting on that first collection, a college contemporary of Galliano said: ‘It was streets ahead of everyone else.
I felt physically sick. It was so good I felt I might as well give up designing because I would never get anywhere near that.' Galliano immediately launched his own label and became the darling of London Fashion Week: within three years, he was British Designer of the Year. However, the bare facts of this rapid rise conceal a story of struggle, partly financial to secure backing and resources for each new collection, and partly personal as the strains of the fashion world's expectations wore down the designer. He was always a highly strung and intense individual, sometimes literally trembling with nerves before a new collection was shown.

In the mid-1980s, Galliano became one of a group of young designers, including Alistair Blair and Richard James, backed by the Danish businessman Peder Bertelsen. He staged his first show in Paris in 1990, albeit without the support of Bertelsen, who had withdrawn from the fashion fray. Next, he found backing from Fayçal Amor, the businessman behind the Plein Sud label, although this partnership again faltered as the orders failed to materialise and the costs of Galliano's extravagant shows soared. Despite an exalted media profile, Galliano was dropped by Amor and was at a low point in a promising career, apparently doomed to follow the path of many young British designers before and since: lauded too early, pressurised to the limit and obliged to drop the dreams of a signature collection and join the backroom design studio of a major foreign label. However, he had a powerful fairy godmother in the form of Anna Wintour, editor of American
Vogue
, who lobbied on his behalf in early 1994. ‘She flew me to America and introduced me to the right people,' recalled Galliano. A backer was identified in the form of John Bult of American investment house PaineWebber. Within three weeks of Bult's stepping in, Galliano had produced a small but perfectly formed collection of seventeen high-glamour outfits shown in the Parisian townhouse of Portuguese millionairess Sao Schlumberger. ‘The marketing director said, “Look John, you need to edit your collection, produce it in so many colours and so many fabrics, and you need to be really choosy about who you sell to,”' recalled Galliano. ‘I really learnt a lot from that little collection.'