The pleasure principle: Dolce & Gabbana’s Sicilian shopping spree
For Spring/Summer 2027, Dolce & Gabbana channelled Sicilian interiors into a richly textured and highly shoppable wardrobe. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
When social climates have historically triggered a sense of escapism, fashion has often looked to the joy of dressing: the way that decorating yourself can literally lift you out of the gloom. This season – with its economy-affecting wars and luxury downturns – things have got somewhat more meta for the fashion industry. Now, shows are about the joy of shopping. It was true for Gucci’s “Store Show”, true for Prada’s 63-ways-of-wearing-skirts collection, and true for Fendi’s commercial proposal staged behind store-like glass facades. On Saturday afternoon at Metropol, you could find the same feeling in a Dolce & Gabbana collection that felt constructed and styled to trigger that dopamine-fuelled shopping impulse to desire-acquire-attire.
Inspired by the interiors of Sicilian palazzi, with their opulent textiles and ornamentation, the looks paraded before your eyes with kid-in-a-candy-store seduction. You could pick at luxe bejewelled tweed jackets, gleaming leopard raincoats, little furry leopard jackets, antique-looking lace skirts and prettily-embroidered denim. Everything came with the kind of texture that makes something look rich, that makes you want to reach out and touch it, and get it, and have it, and wear it. Every look – bar some little black Madonna dresses, which are never not covetable – was a collage of consistency and colour made for tactile pull and haptic desire.
Within that sensibility, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana also activated the psychology that created the shopping mania observed at Chanel since Matthieu Blazy took over. At the moment, charging your runway with different themes, stories and impressions creates a something-for-everyone mentality ripe for the shop floor. Connecting that feeling to the Sicilian influences at the heart of their visual and emotional identity, Dolce and Gabbana were on point. And while much can be said about fashion’s transparent call for people to go shopping, at least that message is tied to the welfare of an industry and not just the indulgence of the individual.
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