Inside Dolce & Gabbana’s largest menswear present but
Dolce & Gabbana’s annual feast of males’s couture is without doubt one of the most dramatic and memorable occasions on the style calendar. Alta Sartoria, because it’s recognized, is rather more than a present: it’s a multi-day expertise, set in a lavish location, the place the home’s A-list shoppers come collectively to have fun the head of sartorial craftsmanship.
There are dinners, there may be dancing, there may be procuring – plenty of procuring. And there may be, in fact, a runway present at which Dolce & Gabbana’s rarest and most unique creations are unveiled earlier than a bedazzled viewers, a lot of whom rush to order the one-of-one items instantly after.
Monday’s Alta Sartoria runway outing in Venice, Italy, featured a unique sort of rush in its closing moments. Given the chance of inclement climate, Dolce & Gabbana moved the present an hour earlier. Because the fashions started swaggering down a large, mirrored runway alongside the medieval Venice Arsenal, the sky darkened. The well-heeled crowd, most attired of their most interesting Alta Sartoria 'matches, held its collective breath. After which, as a trio of fashions sporting lavish, jewel-toned satin fits stepped onto the runway, the skies unleashed a large hailstorm.
What adopted was a livid stampede backstage, alongside the warehouses of the Arsenal, visitors screaming because the skies pelted them with marble-sized chunks of ice. As soon as everybody received to shelter, although, terror ceded to peals of laughter. Not even a biblical storm might dampen the Alta Sartoria occasion. In actual fact, having seen capes and fits resplendent with fairy story supplies (gold leaf, diamonds, reconstructed feathers, crystals, Murano glass), executed by months of painstaking handiwork, the query on everybody’s thoughts was whether or not the clothes had escaped unscathed, too.
In a manner, the storm mirrored the elegant magnificence and power of Venice that Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana channelled by way of the gathering. Every Alta Sartoria season contains creative and artisanal prospers of the town the place it’s proven and Venice has greater than most. (Even the scary and placing sky over the runway appeared to clarify why centuries of painters have chosen Venice as their muse.)
Venice is in all places on this assortment, in each context and content material. A hub of high-quality arts, utilized arts and structure, Venice is a metropolis whose surprise has persevered over time, a dwelling and respiration monument to the clever pursuit of magnificence. It’s a magnificence that should be seen, touched and felt in particular person. As Dolce put it earlier than the present: “Love will not be expertise; Venice will not be expertise.”
The gathering, then, is a veneration of each the craft and the craftsman. There are the literal representations of the Rialto Bridge embroidered on jumpers, jackets and robes, glimpses of winding Venetian streets and its monumental church buildings and palaces rendered in beads, stones and glass. There may be even a painstaking reconstruction of the stone mosaics that adorn the facade of St Mark’s Basilica utilizing Venetian Murano glass, one of many many native and artisanal methods elevated all through the gathering.
Alta Sartoria’s intense embellishment is about greater than celebrating Italian artwork and craftsmanship. It’s straightforward to overlook that till lately, Dolce & Gabbana was one of many solely vogue homes that supplied couture for males.
When Gabbana and Dolce launched Alta Sartoria in 2015, the designers recognised that males would reply to the sensuality of lavish ornamentation. Male peacocks are the colorful ones, in spite of everything. Greater than some other line, Alta Sartoria – which lives someplace between formalwear and function play – provides males licence to indulge within the intimate, even erotic pleasures that courtly supplies resembling silk, brocade and gold can present. The lads’s high-quality jewelry assortment offered (indoors, fortunately) within the Scuola Grande Di San Rocco, added a further magical layer to the fantasy.
After the present, as soon as the visitors had begun to dry out, somebody requested the designers in regards to the destiny of the clothes caught within the tempest. Messrs Dolce and Gabbana mentioned they hadn’t assessed the injury but. However they expressed no regrets about going ahead with the present. “What we can we do as a result of it should be completed, as a result of we find it irresistible,” mentioned Dolce. Occasions could change, controversies could erupt, however the true believers behind Dolce & Gabbana will stand sturdy, not in contrast to Venice in a storm. “Love is a shame,” he continued. “However it’s the solely factor that issues. What issues is what stays."
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