Dolce & Gabbana: Sleek and smooth before Jeff Bezos

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jan 14, 2024

No VIC clients enjoy their brand as much as those of Dolce & Gabbana, who showed up in force this season to rub shoulders with K-pop stars and the outlandishly rich, at a dynamic menswear show.

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There are many great tailors in Italy, but none of them celebrate success more joyfully than Dolce & Gabbana, who this season managed to combine super silhouettes with sass, sex and savvy finishing.
 
All told 62 looks presented before the rich and the faintly roguish – from uber billionaire Jeff Bezos, his missus Laura Gonzales and her son Nikko Gonzales, a somewhat pampered sort who walked in the runway in a smooth black crepe double-breasted suit. And a huge Asia pop star component. From Korea: Rowoon, DPR Ian, Younghoon, Hyunjae. From Thailand: Force, Book Kasidet.

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Entitled 'Sleek', this Fall/Winter 24/25 collection was one of the most inventively tailored expressions in Milan in many years. The duo developing some great new cape/blazers and cape/tuxedos in light conical shapes; or caban style dinner jackets which should not have worked but instead felt like must-haves.
 
Staged like all Dolce & Gabbana shows inside the brand’s Viale Piave show space, where this season a double stairway allowed models to walk up into the middle of the catwalk, as if entering a grand ball, or chic nightclub.

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A collection, composed 80% in black, with dashes of pale gray, silver and just two items of denim. Great for night-time, or for when gents must face weather like last week’s sub-zero Continent. D&G providing some mega Klondike coats – now made in remarkably convincing faux fur.
 
Pre-show, clients had swarmed around embracing each other attired in gold, silver and copper metallic tuxedos, taking up whole rows of seats. A symbol of how the long steady decline in the power of magazines has meant that seats formerly reserved for editors are now taken by clients.
 
Backed up not by rock but some moody piano music – such as Martin Arteta’s 'Past Lives' and climaxing with two great final looks. A noble black model with a spiky afro attired in all black spencer, pleated pants, silk cummerbund, duelist’s white shirt and ribbon-tasselled slippers. 
 
Followed by a patrician young gent with slicked back hair in a playboy mini frack and white Etonian collar shirt.  Think Domenico Dolce goes to Downton Abbey.