Inside Dolce & Gabbana’s exclusive couture club

Dolce & Gabbana’s new Alta Moda couture collection is so exclusive only 100 people were invited to the show. Luke Leitch was granted a preview, photographed by Domenico Dolc

The billionaire’s bejewelled wife clinks glasses and pronounces herself bereft. She has just flown in from the Paris haute couture shows where, she confides, there was barely a single £20,000 (and upwards) new-season, handmade dress to get excited about. ‘Awful. Awful,’ she says, sadly. ‘Except for Valentino, all a waste of time. For anorexics or drug addicts!’ She sips her prosecco, peers left and right, then palpably brightens.
Alta Moda couture spring/summer 2013 report
The marble-floored rooms around us are a seemly jostle of millionairesses, heiresses, princesses and, I suspect, the odd adventuress too. These 100-or-so women – whom we have agreed not to identify – range in age from twentysomething to seventysomething, and include many of the world’s most enthusiastic couture customers. Tonight, however, they have been diverted away from couture’s usual beaten track to Milan: this gilded salon in specially bought apartments just behind via della Spiga is the home of Dolce & Gabbana’s great Alta Moda

 

During their 28 years together, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have built their Milan-based business into one of the biggest global brands in the fashion industry. And while Milan is unarguably one of that industry’s most important centres – hub of the still-unrivalled quality clothing manufacturing base that blossomed in Italy after the Second World War – it has never been feted at fashion’s most elevated level. For couture, the type of clothing purchased by the ladies in this room, is not something that is made in a factory. Couture is pre-industrial fashion, a system of small workshops privately commissioned to hand-produce bespoke, personally fitted clothes for a select group of clients. This system dates from 18th-century Paris, but has never meant anything much in Milan.
Dolce & Gabbana autumn/winter 2013 show report
Then, last summer in Sicily, Dolce & Gabbana launched their own couture collection, named Alta Moda. In a converted monastery under Mt Etna named San Domenico, the Sicilian born tailor’s son Domenico Dolce explained, ‘This is not work, this is pleasure’, before revealing enormously boned gowns in froth-light lace, lots of hip-accentuating tailoring, and a great deal of painterly floral embellishment.
For this second Alta Moda collection, the designers decided to move the show from Sicily, the source of so much of their inspiration, to Milan, the source of so much of their success. As Milan-born Stefano Gabbana explained during the fitting two days earlier, ‘This is where we are from too. This is the home of our house, and all the staff who are part of Alta Moda: the Cinderella mice! We call the workers little mice after [the dress-making mice in] Cinderella. It is