Dolce&Gabbana's summer is all about confidence

For the past few years, Dolce&Gabbana has been shifting gears. After a long phase of maximalism, spent translating into the fabric the regal excesses of Sicilian baroque, the two designers have begun to meditate on what has made them, over long years, legendary personalities in fashion, owners of one of the last independent giants of the industry that is almost a kingdom unto itself, endowed with its own language, its own clientele and, until a few years ago, its own schedule for fashion shows. Back on the official fashion week calendar, the two designers have also returned to thinking about their own origins, the Sicily they tell has become more essential and sublimated than immediately decorative, but above all, their meditation on the archive and the past have led, this season, to a reflection on the idea of style - an idea that gave its title to the SS24 show presented last Saturday. «The manner of dressing and conduct of a person who has spontaneous, refined and composed elegance» one reads in the lookbook, but it can also be seen on the runway with a series of looks that run through all the registers explored by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana over the course of a very long career: from the rigorous to the languid, from the opulent to the austere, from the antique to the contemporary.

This identity is expressed through that of individual garments - the Sicily of yesteryear is recounted, for example, through pinstripe suits that look like something out of a Giuseppe Leone photo, but rendered both sublime in materials and cuts and extremely modern, firmly situated in 2023 with its cultural and social contexts; elsewhere, a detail, a high waist, the absence of sleeves, the tightness or transparency of a sweater are enough, by themselves, to take this old-fashioned Italian man and transport him with masterly and deliberate malice into a world of wholly contemporary sensuality. There is self-confidence and even a certain smugness that has always characterized the Dolce&Gabbana man, at once virile and narcissistic, masculine and ostentatious - but now, with this new meditative tone that is nothing more than the confidence with which the designers develop their language, this man loses his aggressive charge, his haughtiness is replaced by a quiet pride, and he takes on composure and dignity that, even in the presence of less canonical details and androgynous undertones, can only come from an identity that has found full fulfillment. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana know who they are -their style is just the ultimate proof of that.