Knowledge Is Power at Dolce Gabbana’s Alta Sartoria Show
Dolce Gabbana’s past couture show venues have included a wild promontory in Capri, a gilded palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal, and an ancient Greek temple in Sicily. For Saturday’s menswear Alta Sartoria installment of their latest Alta Moda outing, the designers turned to a location closer to home: their local library.
Why? “The most important attribute for a gentleman is wisdom,” offered Domenico Dolce before the show: “We need to eat with our eyes and our ears and our brains the books, the music, and the art. This is the best food for self-improvement.”
As a venue in which to feast on culture, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana is very well provisioned. It was founded in 1609 by Milan’s Archbishop, Cardinal Borromeo, and is the second-oldest operating public library in Europe. It was the first to use a new-fangled system called bookshelves: on them boasts thousands of treasures that include an illuminated 5th-century edition of the Iliad and the Codex Atlanticus, a bound manuscript of more than 1,000 pages of original drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci. Upstairs is an art gallery that includes works from Borromeo’s own collection, including Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, as well as Da Vinci’s Portrait of a Musician and the vast-sketched “cartoon” by Raphael entitled The School of Athens.
Before the guests—who had traveled from as far as the U.S., Russia, China, India, Brazil, and beyond—saw the show in the gallery upstairs, they were invited to linger amongst Borromeo’s outrageous collection of books. Displayed alongside the Codex Atlanticus was a new watch created by the company’s horologists that used a Da Vinci sketch of a tower clock—which they had built to scale and was also displayed—as the basis for their design.
If there was a Dewey Decimal System for the classification of couture techniques, then many of its boxes would have been ticked in the collection that followed. After an opening look comprised of a cashmere cassocked homage to Borromeo himself, we saw a time-traveling portfolio of masculine clothing that mixed the sumptuous with the scholarly. As well as the spectacles worn by almost every model, the studious atmosphere was created by dark tailored pieces whose silhouettes echoed centuries spanning the 18th to the 20th, often accessorized with a ruff and sometimes with a swagger stick or felt hats that had been gently battered to impart just the faintest hint of bohemian learnedness.
Interspersed with these more sober looks were scores of shining examples of the craft long studied by Dolce and Gabbana. Jackets, jerkins, and coats recreated artworks including that Caravaggio, the Leonardo, a Botticelli Madonna, and portraits by Moroni—an artist whose work the designers had become transfixed by while researching this collection—in handmade punto pittura and French-knot stitching. There was a vest in woven sections of dyed mink that created an abstract of the Caravaggio; jackets, coats, and shoes of quail feathers in homage to an indigenous Tupinambá cloak donated to the gallery in the 17th century; and huge organza-lined overcoats that mixed astrakhan, mink, and beaver in complicated grids of stripe and chevron. Suits and coats in velvet or wool came overlaid with windowpane checks applied in strips of dyed snakeskin and crocodile. Elsewhere, the fur collars on some regal embroidered overcoats had been given a new treatment in which they’d been dipped and coated in 24-karat gold, and the pinstripes on one otherwise black suit were also etched in gold. Shirts and smocks were painted in recreations of Leonardo’s sketches, or illuminated with views of the library’s priceless shelves.
As repositories of clothes-making knowledge, Dolce, Gabbana, and their hundreds of Alta Moda and Sartoria atelier artisans are already well equipped. According to Dolce, however, they will never stop learning: “Because experience is what improves you. And the more we improve the more we are able to give joy through what we know and discover.”
Photo: Courtesy of Dolce Gabbana1/9
Photo: Courtesy of Dolce Gabbana2/9
