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On the first night of Dolce Gabbana’s Alta Moda festivities in Puglia, in the heel of the boot of Italy, Dame Helen Mirren was talking up the native flora. The actress and local resident pointed out that some of the region’s olive trees are as old as—or even older—than Rome’s Colosseum. The famous Roman structure has a couple of millennia on Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s business, but at 40 this year, their brand is its own kind of Italian institution: colorful, proud, and rooted in family and tradition, but also quite alive in the popular imagination.
A few months after last summer’s 10-year anniversary Alta Moda festivities in Sicily, season two of The White Lotus took place there. In the first episode, its star Jennifer Coolidge steps off the boat giving main character energy in a Dolce Gabbana hourglass floral sheath. She never finds her dolce vita, but that hasn’t stopped tourists from descending on the place in search of some seaside glamour of their own. If you can’t book a hotel room on the island this summer, the designers are at least part of the reason why.
This year, though, they set out to tell a different kind of Italian story. There’s no way to call a five-day event in which ultra-high net worth clients from around the world party together and vie against each other for five- and six-figure dresses a humble affair, but like other designers in this moment of global chaos and uncertainty, Dolce and Gabbana feel drawn to symbols of realness.
That’s why a crowd that included Venus Williams, Christian Bale, Erling Haaland, Kim and Kris Kardashian, and 500-or-so other guests found themselves in Puglia, which in addition to nurturing the world’s oldest olive trees is known as one of Italy’s two breadbaskets. (The country loves its bread too much to have just one.) That’s why the Alta Moda show was set in Alberobello, a Unesco World Heritage Site with hundreds of cone-roofed stone buildings dating to the 14th century—they’re called trulli—so picturesque it looks like a movie set. And that’s why its local craftspeople were posted on the narrow streets hand-making orecchiette, weaving straw baskets, working leather into bridles, and even carving children’s toys out of cactus leaves.
“This is heaven for Instagram,” a fellow show-goer declared as we made our way down a cobbled street at magic hour. The brand replaced the local asphalt for the occasion in a give-and-take exchange, but at the press conference before the show, Gabbana made it clear: “This is not a pantomime, we want to show what’s real.” Dolce, for his part, called it “the most authentic show of our lives,” expanding on the thought, “it’s clothes for cooking, but in an Alta Moda way, and why not?”
The two aprons this reviewer noticed appeared to be cut from crisp black silk, perhaps not the kind of thing you’d risk spilling tomato sauce on. But the designers did indeed look to the local crafts for inspiration. The first model wore an enormous glazed straw hat in the conical shape of the trulli, and there were basket weave corsets and lingerie sets collaged from crochet doilies. The show’s most elaborately worked pieces were capes and skirts formed by intarsias of many different fabrics depicting Alberobello’s hilly streets and unique architecture. Also stunning was an ivory cape woven not from straw but from thin strips of silk duchesse and mikado.
By Alta Moda standards it was notably discreet—not minimal per se, but simpler than their previous made-to-measure offerings, a point they tried to make by sending models out with townspeople and farm animals, including an adorable baby sheep. Last year’s silver and gold and heaps of crystals were nowhere to be seen, and the clouds of brightly hued taffeta were replaced by softer, more ethereal tulle. The key silhouette was a slip dress patch-worked from geometric swatches of transparent lace, cut close to the body then flaring out below the waist into a small train, and worn over lace teddies or bra and briefs sets. Sexy, but not in the va-va-voom way that Dolce and Gabbana are famous for; sensual might be a better word.
Towards the end, the feminine looks, which included a few runway-spanning hoop skirts, apparently a first for the designers, were interspersed with masculine cut embroidered smoking jackets and tuxedos. Dolce and Gabbana were doing this kind of runway role playing way back in their early days. That’s another way they created the sense of authenticity they were after, by playing up their own strong roots.
