Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White: Dolce & Gabbana’s Fall show was a compendium of princess-y fairy-tale fantasies. “Today, every girl wants to be a princess,” Stefano Gabbana asserted at a preview. “Today, everything is possible for the young generation!” He and Domenico Dolce see themselves as storytellers as much as fashion designers, whose job is to divert people’s anxieties away from reality—much as, well, Walt Disney did himself. “We know how the world is today. Fashion makes people dream—this is the service fashion gives,” Gabbana concluded.
So this time, rather than revisiting Sicilian history again, the designers found new roles for some of their familiar pieces. The fitted midi dress turned a tinselly pale blue for Cinderella; raw-edged houndstooth tweed coats and suits became her scullery maid “before” clothes; the black lace “widow” dresses converted ideally to wicked stepmother-wear; the formal menswear tailoring attired Prince Charming; and lots of gold-frogged and tailcoated military jackets outfitted a toy soldier army from The Nutcracker.
Dolce & Gabbana have taken up a fascinating position vis-a-vis fashion in the past few years. The less they’ve paid heed to the supposed pressure to overhaul their collections with a radically different look every season and the more they’ve worked on writing chapters in their own playbook, the more successful they’ve become. And the more fun they’re having. A glance at Stefano Gabbana’s Instagram feed proves what a ridiculous, goofy sense of humor he has. It had been fully let loose on the details and accessories this time—in the glittery beaded patches on dresses and novelty sweaters showing the Seven Dwarves, toadstools, chandeliers, cats, and tailor mice, and in box bags made in the shape of castles and pumpkins. Even, in one case, on a (literal) vanity bag with a mirror scrawled with the words Who is the most beautiful? Me!
Not that the show didn’t pick up the points of the season so far: It had plenty of glitter, obviously, but also registered oversize tailoring in a black jacket and velvet-collared menswear coat, and the ’30/’40s shoulder line of the Cinderella-referenced puffed sleeves. What might have seemed odd is that the designers did not send in the gowns for the finale. There ought to be gowns at the end of a Cinderella tale, surely?
The answer is that Dolce & Gabbana have no need to do fantasy gowns anymore, because they make full-on ball gowns for real balls and actual princesses and heiresses in their Alta Moda Couture collection, which they showed to stupendous effect on the stage of La Scala Milan only four weekends ago. Given that perspective, the playful, lighthearted item- and accessory-packed ready-to-wear collection shown today represented a part of the smart parceling-out method Dolce & Gabbana have arrived at. The ready-to-wear can amuse all girls and women, get teenagers to lobby moms for holiday and birthday gifts, and give moms an excuse, maybe, to purchase themselves a black dress or suit. And, by the way, none of us is ever going to be confused by seeing a Dolce & Gabbana pre-collection publicized betweenwhiles. “We do things, but it’s a secret until they go straight into our stores,” said Gabbana. What was that—they’ve already got see-now-buy-now sorted out? To so many others in the fashion world, that really does sound like magic.
