Madonna mia: post-Luar appearance in New York, the Material Girl is back on the fashion circuit. The Italian-American chameleon sat front row at Dolce Gabbana’s Italian Beauty-themed show today in Milan, dressed in the widow’s weeds that Domenico and Stefano have, over their decades-long career, recast as luxurious rather than lugubrious. Beneath her lacy veil: a golden crown–fitting, given that her influence ran through the entire spring 2025 collection, particularly the platinum Like a Prayer-era wigs and conical bra corsetry modeled by the likes of Vittoria Ceretti and Mona Tougaard.
Madonna may not be Sicilian (her family hails from Bay City by way of Abruzzo), but she’s one of Dolce Gabbana’s most significant and enduring muses. In the early ’90s, it’s one Ms Ciccone who catapulted the nascent designers into the spotlight–wearing their label, Complice, on the cover of Vogue’s October 1992 issue while simultaneously promoting the release of her book Sex, her album Erotica, and her movie Body of Evidence (a “multimedia pelvic thrust”, as interviewer David Handelman put it). Mere weeks after the issue landed, she had decamped to Milan, where she watched Dolce Gabbana present the spring 1993 collection of their namesake brand, an eclectic and intoxicating amalgamation of Botticelli prints, oversized Victorian cameos, and designs that riffed on Pakistan’s Hippie Trail in the ’70s.
She liked what she saw. When la regina del pop–who made Jean Paul Gaultier a household name with 1990’s Blond Ambition tour–went back on the road with The Girlie Show, she tapped Dolce Gabbana to style her performances, which were partially inspired by the mood of Edward Hopper’s most risqué work. Among the outré looks that Stefano and Domenico devised for Madonna: a Marlene Dietrich-esque suit, complete with carnation boutonniere, which she wore to sing “Like a Virgin” in a German accent; the bell-sleeved paisley top she appeared in to swing from a giant disco ball during “Express Yourself”; and a Breton-striped number riffing on Gene Kelly’s Anchors Aweigh costume for the “La Isla Bonita” segment of the show.
It would cement what turned out to be a decades-long friendship. It’s Dolce Gabbana fetishwear that Madonna’s wearing on the cover of 2008’s Hard Candy album, while her “Celebration” video was shot at Stefano and Domenico’s Metropol Theatre in Milan the following July. And the year after that? Steven Klein would capture her for both the house’s spring/summer and autumn/winter 2010 campaigns in the style of a modern-day Anna Magnani in Neorealist films such as Mamma Roma. Who knows what else the trio have in store for the remainder of the 2020s, but it will inevitably be molto provocante. As Madonna told the New York Times when the Vatican condemned Like a Prayer in 1989: “Art should be controversial, and that’s all there is to it.”