Dolce & Gabbana kick off a new era as Alta Moda returns to Taormina, Sicily
Fourteen years after launching Alta Moda in Taormina, Dolce & Gabbana returned to Sicily with a Fall/Winter 26 celebration of fantasy, craftsmanship and change. EE72 Fashion Critic Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
It’s been fourteen years since Dolce & Gabbana staged their first Alta Moda show. Conceived as the Milanese powerhouse’s Italian alternative to haute couture, its inaugural collection was presented in the Sicilian resort town of Taormina. This summer, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana returned to the island’s jewel town, so embedded in the brand’s genetics. The homecoming marked a season of change for the independent fashion house. In April, the designers hired Stefano Cantino as their new CEO, opening their family-led management structure to a major external luxury executive for the first time.
In a press conference held on the roof terrace of Taormina’s Dolce & Gabbana store and café on the day of the Alta Moda women’s show, Cantino acknowledged the winds of change when asked if his appointment represents a new era for the house: “When a family company opens the door to a new person, by definition, the company is entering a new era.” They rang it in with an hour-long Alta Moda show presented in the botanical gardens of Radicepura to some three hundred illustrious private clients from around the world and a small group of press.
When a family company opens the door to a new person, by definition, the company is entering a new era.
STEFANO CANTINO
In their show notes, Dolce and Gabbana – who weren’t giving interviews, but chatted casually with guests during the post-show dinner – framed the history of Taormina as a “meeting of ancient Sicilian nobility and the international sophisticates drawn there during the Grand Tours of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” The spirit, especially that of the latter, was evident in the Belle Époque mood of the collection, which fused old-world glamour with ancient motifs realised through the mind-blowing craftsmanship of the Alta Moda ateliers.
Watching an Alta Moda show is a kind of sensory overload that has to be seen to be believed. Every inch of every garment is hypnotising: from fantastical ballgowns in mille-feuille tulle to whimsical creations with statues popping out of dresses or floral vines encircling the heads of models, as well as the more pared-down Sicilian black lace dresses Dolce & Gabbana master like no one else. If the bespoke outfit choices of the Alta Moda clients are indicative of what this exclusive demographic desires most of all, it’s fantasy all the way.
In the luxuriant garden settings of the pre-show cocktail and post-show dinner, they looked like mythical creatures mingling up a storm in all their colourful, sparkly couture, dripping in encrusted lace and handcrafted embroideries and tulle illusion veils and Alta Gioielleria jewels the price of a small state. Joining the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Christian Bale and Real Housewives super-client Jennifer Tilly, Alta Moda is the ultimate playground of the one-per-cent eccentrics: a place where looking and acting larger than life is not indulgence, but etiquette.
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