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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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...
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