La Dolce Vita.

Byline: Photographed by Steven Meisel

Your lipstick just got a lot sexier. Vicki Woods on the new line from Dolce & Gabbana.

Milan is not a romantic city like Paris or Rome: The fashion capital of Italy is where people go to do business. So the nondescript street door of Dolce & Gabbana's office building does not surprise me, nor does the totally black and minimal foyer. What surprises me is upstairs: a riot of Italian baroque and opulence and color and utter Dolce & Gabbana fabulousness and luxury. I'm whirled through a salon of marble and gold, past a dining room with leopard-print-upholstered gilt chairs, a leopard-lacquered table, and leopard-papered walls, and into what I guess you might call the meeting room: la biblioteca the library. Boom! There's an Italian Renaissance canvas on the wall. Also museum-quality furniture, chandeliers, brocade drapes, more flowers than you could fit in your car (lilac roses, bordeaux amaryllis), floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, and a modern painting over the mantel that calls to mind Botticelli's Birth of Venus (except that the nude is male, and he has neither waiting woman nor yards of gold hair to cover his modesty). Even the rug is Dolce & Gabbana, a huge patchwork of their fabric pieces. I immediately want to throw myself down on it and be fed grapes and champagne by young men inI don't knowleather shorts? The Italian for "luxury" is lusso, which is a great word, with its echoes (in English) of "loose" and "louche."

Pat McGrath went directly to the signatures that have always fired up the womenswear: the glamour of old Hollywood, their gardens, Rome's CinecittA in the fifties

This is Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana's "design office." They also have a head office, a press office, and a commercial office here in Milan, plus multiple houses, yachts, a restaurant, around 80 freestanding stores done up like palaces all over the globe, and factories of their own in Italy. Twenty years ago, they had only each other and a joint ambition to "make fashion."

So Stefano Gabbana is sitting here in the library on a crimson sofa, with his eyes closed and a small gold object in his hand. He is sniffing it hard, drawing very deep, and giggling. When he passes it to me, I draw in a deep breath and start giggling like an idiot myself before giving it up to his outstretched hand: Don't bogart that lipstick, my friend.

Because that's what it is: a lipstick. Dolce & Gabbana have created a billion-dollar fashion universe, but something was missing, and I have come to Milan today to get a first look at that something: their latest constellationcosmetics.