Ten years ago, Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce came up with what seemed like a risky plan. They had recently closed their lower-cost D&G range, which was profitable and ubiquitous in certain nightlife venues, but was no longer the image they wanted to be remembered for. Twenty years after financing the company they self-funded, they decided to launch an Alta Moda line.
Alta moda is the Italian equivalent of haute couture. Like haute couture, it offers elaborate, expensive, slow-fashion, tailored clothing (in Italy rather than France) with an almost nerdy emphasis on craft and an arrogant disregard for practicality. And like couture, it requires workrooms from highly skilled artisans.
Most Italian luxury fashion brands had given up alta moda decades earlier. Even in Paris, gilded names like Chanel and Dior struggled to make money from couture. The entrance fees, even in 2012, were around £30,000 for a “simple” dress that took weeks to try on before being finished.
At the dawn of the new millennium, there were too few customers with the money or the patience to run all those offices. Couture was a prestige marketing exercise that most homes could do without, and the number of names still producing couture had dwindled from about 25 in the 1980s to a handful in 2010.
From Dolce & Gabbana’s first Alta Moda show in the summer of 2012, which they decided to hold not in Milan but in Dolce’s native Sicily, they knew they were on to something. That first event was attended by about 100 potential customers – a few Europeans, some Russians and Americans, a few Chinese… and what’s incredible, Dolce told me a year later, “is that they don’t just want Alta Moda for parties, but for every aspect of their lives, even gardening and sleeping.” Cue the world’s most expensive pyjamas.
Ten years later, the duo launched Alta Sartoria – for men – and Alta Gioielleria (a jewelry line where size certainly matters), expanding the event from two nights to five, taking the circus to Venice, Portofino, Capri and Naples. Last weekend the spectacle was, fittingly, back in Sicily. The designers are blessed to have been born in a country with an abundance of delightful cities that look like stage sets.