Domenico Dolce was 7 years old when he first visited the Chinese Palace in Palermo. He didn't get it at all. "Too stupid," he said after the Dolce & Gabbana show today, tapping his head for emphasis. But why would a child understand a bizarre Asian fantasia sprouted in the heart of Catholic Sicily? It took the man that child became to spin an aristocratic 18th-century folly into a fashion fairy story for the 21st century.
Each new collection from Dolce & Gabbana now presents a revision of signatures old, like the strict tailoring, and new, like the oversize geisha silhouette. But there's never a sense of the banality that you might expect to attach itself to the overly familiar. That's because the clothes are infused with a visual intensity that transcends the kitschiness of the imagery to become something verging on celebration. The parade of peacocks and dragons and swallows darting through bamboo forests that passed down the catwalk was indeed a catalog of kitsch, but by the time those elements had been printed on a silk boot or embroidered on a lace shirt or knitted into a cardigan sweater, they'd become facets of a collection that also featured three-piece suits and patched jeans and summery striped pants and an army of polo shirts. A whole lot of separates, in other words—suggestions for integrating even the most extravagant piece into a wardrobe.
A raw-edged hopsack tee embroidered with birds perched in an orange tree was a perfect fusion of chinoiserie and Sicily, combining artful and humble. But there was humor, too, in such a notion, and you could also see it in the espadrilles with which every outfit was paired, sometimes plain, more often lavishly embroidered or beaded. Peasant footwear made fit for a king. Two years ago Stefano Gabbana said, "There is so much in Sicily, we could be doing this forever." He wasn't kidding.
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