by Brenda Polan
The early Gaultier collections were characterised by a flood of contrasting designs and ideas, created in circumstances of financial desperation. An initial two-year contract in 1979 with Japan’s Kashiyama, thanks to the support of Kashiyama creative director Dominique Emschweiller, set Gaultier on a more professional footing. Simultaneously (and not coincidentally), the press began to take fulsome notice of Gaultier, even if much of the interest was founded on his ability to entertain—he was an oddity, a cult, a cause célèbre. He was ‘Paris’s Court Jester’, according to WWD in 1984. In a prolonged interview with biographer Colin McDowell, Gaultier denied that his intention was to destroy the past. ‘I use and respect tradition, but try to find new elements which will make it younger.’ His goal was to question notions of good taste, but founded on the solid base of the tailoring skills he had acquired in the milieu of haute couture.
Gaultier was also keen to break down what he saw as artificial barriers between menswear and womenswear. Why shouldn’t men wear skirts? His introduction of men’s skirts in 1985 and constant repetition of the theme was no gimmick but was based on a fundamental belief that clothes should not be gender specific. ‘Masculinity is not connected to the clothes you’re wearing—it’s in the mind,’ he said.
The late 1980s saw Gaultier’s business expand rapidly, backed by Gibo in Italy and Kashiyama in Japan. The Gaultier aesthetic was well represented in his Paris store in rue Vivienne, blending ancient-look mosaics with his innovative clothes, and in stores in Milan, London and Brussels. Gaultier’s openness about his sexuality and mix-it-up approach to design brought him into the heart of rapidly evolving popular culture, working with photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino on advertising campaigns and videos, choreographer Régine Chopinot, film directors Peter Greenaway and Pedro Almodovar. The early 1990s were even better for Gaultier, who forged on with growing confidence, despite the personal loss of his partner, Francis Menuge, from Aids in 1990. A commission to design a wardrobe for Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour in 1990 led to the creation of a corset including a conical bra, which Gaultier later chose as the bottle shape for his fragrance, launched in 1993 and packaged in a tin can.
Gaultier has continously challenged mainstream thinking and stirred up controversy, ranging from nuns as strippers in 1991 to a collection shown on black models in 1997 at a time when the French government was clamping down on immigration. His fashion shows have often been spectacles, lavishly mounted in a variety of different locations, paving the way for the imaginative shows staged by designers such as Alexander McQueen and Viktor & Rolf in the noughties. Gaultier’s arrival under his own name in the haute couture arena was a long time in coming, despite the infusion of new talent that gave haute couture renewed vigour in the 1990s. His first collection, in January 1996, was shown to no music in a pastiche of the old couture style, but the collection, called the Couture Man, was entirely for men. A women’s collection followed a year later.
Gaultier was treated with reverence in French fashion circles into the noughties, although by then many of the barriers he had broken through were no longer considered barriers. His work, it could be argued, was done. Hermès bought a 35 per cent stake in his business in 1999, providing him with a solid foundation for the years ahead. But the pressures of maintaining a couture operation, always a loss-making part of the business, forced Gaultier to make job cuts in 2004. ‘We’ve run up the stairs two at a time,’ said Donald Potard, his long-term business partner and president of the house. ‘Now we need to catch our breath to continue operating all of our activities.’ At Hermès, where he was appointed creative director of womenswear in May 2003, he showed that he could adapt to another house’s style. Pascale Mussard, artistic director, said: ‘People ask what Gaultier has brought to Hermès but it’s not arrogant to consider what Hermès brought to Gaultier. You could say we help each other see with each other’s eyes.’
For Gaultier, the distance between himself and Hermès was not so great. When he worked at the couture house of Patou, he used to wear riding boots and was teased by the vendeuses (‘they asked me where was my “orse” ‘). In interviews he recalled the comment of the photographer Helmut Newton that Hermès is ‘the most important sex shop in the world,’ highlighting the leather, whips and stirrups. His biographer, Colin McDowell, points out that Jean Paul Gaultier ‘hides his seriousness behind a facetious facade.’ In so doing, he sums up the playful postmodern spirit of contemporary popular culture and has inspired young designers and other artists in the 1990s and beyond (including Martin Margiela and Nicolas Ghesquière) to dispense with convention and pursue their inner dreams. Academic Barbara Vinken sees him as inheriting the mantle of Elsa Schiaparelli—‘a kind of surrealism against the grain, which consciously makes a fool of itself.’ But another, more straightforward Vinken observation may be more appropriate: ‘Gaultier has plundered the attic of fashion, and offers his customers his most daring and cheeky finds.’
What shines through in all of Gaultier’s work and career is his lifelong love of fashion. ‘I am not interested in business,’ he said in a newspaper interview in the early 1990s. ‘I didn’t do fashion to be rich and famous. Of course, I like the rewards. They are a luxury for me, but my first luxury is to do what I want. I don’t want to hand everything over to assistants and become a businessman.’
Further reading: Farid Chenoune’s Jean Paul Gaultier (1996) is a short introduction to the designer, but the biography Jean Paul Gaultier (2000), by Colin McDowell, is a more detailed read. Gaultier himself had fun with a comic book–style autobiography, A Nous Deux La Mode (1990), which is only available in French. The designer was also interviewed by Roger Tredre for The Independent (‘A One-man Revolt Against the Cliché’, 2 August 1990).
42 DOLCE & GABBANA (DOMENICO DOLCE 1958–, STEFANO GABBANA 1962–)
The most successful design partnership in fashion history, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, burst onto the fashion scene in the mid-1980s through a mixture of talent, perspiration, inspired marketing and luck. They were the last Italian designers of the twentieth century to make a real mark, creating extravagant fashion collections that played with themes and periods with happy abandon. Their success was founded on sharp tailoring combined with street style and a flair for bringing to life the Italy of their and their customers’ dreams.
The fashion press called them fashion’s mix masters, making the comparison with DJs who mix music to create a kaleidoscope of sounds. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana were rarely hesitant in their creative vision, churning out ideas in abundance and ransacking the decades (in particular the 1930s to the 1980s). In their magpie approach to fashion design, they summed up the free spirit of modern fashion. Among their hits: pinstripe mannish tailoring for women, underwear worn as outerwear, curvaceous dresses, spectacularly colourful coats and, invariably, lashings of leopard print. Despite an occasional misstep, they have a talent for tuning in to the mood of the times. As Gabbana put it, ‘Fashion has to be in step with the times. Today more than ever, conceptual just doesn’t pay back and is destined to fail.’
Although in later years their collections displayed a taste that teetered into kitsch, the Dolce & Gabbana signature often encapsulates the best of Italian fashion. Journalist Sarah Mower, who edited their celebratory twentieth anniversary book, said they represented ‘a kind of psychic map of Italy.’ The success of their partnership rested on the attraction of opposites, as they acknowledged in interview after interview; Dolce is the craftsman while Gabbana has his finger on the pulse of popular culture. As Gabbana put it: ‘We start from two really different points. He starts from the left, I start from the right. And we meet in the middle.’
Domenico Dolce, the older of the two, was born in Sicily in the village of Polizzi Generosa in 1958. His father was a tailor specialising in suits for local gentry’s weddings, while his mother owned a general haberdashery store. Legend has it that Dolce’s crib was set up in his father’s workroom. Dolce grew up playing with
fabrics; at seven he made a pair of trousers. At an exceptionally early age, the pattern was set for his life. Stefano Gabbana was born four years later in 1962 in Milan. There was no fashion in his family background: his father was a printer from Venice. An exceptionally good-looking young man, Gabbana moved to Milan to study graphic design in the early 1980s, a period when the city’s fashion industry was flourishing as never before. The designer that caught the eye of Gabbana most strongly was Elio Fiorucci, Italy’s ebullient king of kitsch style.
Gabbana met Dolce on the phone initially when the latter answered a job enquiry call in the office where he was working. Dolce had moved to Milan from Sicily to study design and quickly landed a job as an assistant at a local fashion house. Taking Gabbana under his wing, he taught him to sketch and understand the design process before Gabbana was obliged to spend eighteen months on military service. By late 1982, Gabbana was back in town and the two were sharing an apartment. Their focus on work was relentless (Gabbana thinks he was probably thirty before they took their first holiday). But they also partied hard, out until the early hours at Amnesia and other hot clubs of the time, enjoying the sheer decadence of the fashion industry.
Dolce & Gabbana staged their first show in October 1985 as part of a group showing for three young designer labels at the back end of the Milan show season. Despite avoiding the power dressing that was dominant in fashion at the time, their complicated geometric cuts received encouraging press coverage. But their manufacturer took fright and promptly pulled out. The duo appeared to be out of business before they had even started. Dolce’s family came to the rescue, producing a second collection for the two young designers. It was named Real Women, not least because they could not afford models and had to enlist friends to model the clothes. The collection was full of fabrics used in unconventional ways, including a coat made out of sweatshirting and a dress in a rubberised wool. The beginnings of a buzz began to ripple through the Milanese fashion scene. By the third collection, for spring/summer 1987, store buyers were showing interest, even if the versatile clothes, which could be worn in two or more different ways, were not easy to explain to customers. Was it a skirt or a dress? In fact, it was both. Dolce & Gabbana were also drawing on the innovative brilliance of Italy’s textile manufacturers, working with such new fabrics as stretch silk and a transparent organza jersey.
Up until their fourth collection, Dolce had resisted drawing on his Sicilian roots for inspiration. ‘I’d come to Milan because I wanted to break from the past,’ he explained. ‘I dreamed modern! I resisted going back there.’ Gabbana, by contrast, had no such qualms. For a photo shoot, he persuaded a non-fashion photographer, Fernando Scianna, to join them in Sicily with the model Marpesa to produce moody black-and-white images that had an authentic aura of Sicily. Black and white paid homage to the Italian cinema of the 1940s, when neorealist directors such as Roberto Rossellini produced gritty movies set in the Deep South. Another key influence was Visconti, whose film The Leopard was the inspiration behind the designers’ spring/summer 1988 collection. All this was laced with erotic elements, as academic Barbara Vinken has noted: ‘There is a touch of Sicilian passion, in the manner of Sophia Loren: an affirmative, even aggressive feminine eroticism, adult and dominant.’
Curiously, British and American store buyers were quicker to appreciate Dolce & Gabbana than the Italians. From Rossellini to Sophia Loren to Anna Magnani, all the great icons of twentieth-century Italian popular culture were referenced by the two designers. Their models, ranging from Isabella Rossellini (daughter of Roberto) to Linda Evangelista (of Canadian Italian parentage), were chosen for their Italian spirit. Rossellini recalled: ‘The first piece of theirs that I wore was a white shirt, cut in such a way that my breasts appeared to be exploding.’ It was, perhaps, all too much for their countrymen and women. As Dolce acknowledged, ‘At first, Dolce & Gabbana were too Italian for the Italians.’ In truth, Dolce & Gabbana have looked as much to Britain as to Italy for creative ideas. ‘Italy has too much culture, too much history about clothes, and sometimes this is negative because they care too much,’ said Gabbana in 2000. ‘They have no humour about it. The English have humour. We take inspiration from London all the time.’
The early 1990s—the era of the supermodels—saw any doubts about the talents of the duo swept aside worldwide. Reacting against the constraints of feminism, powerful, successful women were more prepared to celebrate their sexuality. Dolce & Gabbana delivered the fashion to match, creating lavish beaded and embroidered corsets and bras festooned with Swarovski stones. The pop star Madonna became a fan, customer and friend. Photographer Steven Meisel and supermodel Linda Evangelista produced memorable images for the Dolce & Gabbana advertising campaigns that somehow pulled off the difficult trick of being romantic, nostalgic, modern and relevant all at once.
From meagre beginnings, the business flourished. While many other designers of the 1980s and 1990s soared only to crash and burn within double-quick time, Dolce & Gabbana sustained momentum. They were blessed with reliable production, signing an agreement in 1988 with Dolce Saverio, the clothing firm based in Legnano, near Milan, and owned by Dolce’s family. Two years later, a menswear line was launched to instant acclaim, drawing unapologetically on the comfortable shapes and easy style of Sicilian men’s tailoring. For four years in the early 1990s, the designers also worked as consultants on Complice, a collection produced by Genny, a deal that gave them further financial strength. A series of licensing deals followed, including a women’s fragrance in 1991, a men’s underwear collection in 1993 and the D&G younger line in 1994.
The Dolce & Gabbana homage to Italy was rarely subtle: the spring collection of 1993 featured trouser suits with photo prints of The Birth of Venus, the Renaissance masterpiece by Sandro Botticelli. Season after season, the styling was brash, exuberant and celebratory. At a time when many designers were opting for minimalism and an austere vision, Dolce & Gabbana were like a breath of fresh air. In 1997, the designers decided to show their collections in their palazzo rather than on a conventional runway. As the craftsmanship in their collections became more pronounced, drawing on Italy’s craft traditions that still flourished (in contrast to elsewhere in Europe), they decided to bring the collection closer to the audience: they wanted people to see the clothes. When the minimalist wave in fashion finally burned out, Dolce & Gabbana were well positioned to welcome back maximalism. The collections of the turn of the century saw them go ‘totally crazy’, to quote the designers themselves. Brazilian Gisele Bündchen was their favourite new model, dressed in patchwork jeans or lace miniskirts for the autumn/winter 1999/2000 collection.
That the two designers, working and living in tandem, remained lovers as well as partners for around nineteen years of their label’s existence was some achievement. The full story of their relationship is unlikely to be told, although they acknowledged the pressures, admitting in their twentieth anniversary book that their collection for spring/summer 1999, focusing on fabric innovation, was an explosive period in their partnership. Their personal relationship was under profound strain, although the final announcement of their separation did not come until 2005. ‘We have a different type of pillow-talk now,’ Gabbana said in typically direct fashion, while emphasising that the business was unaffected. ‘While we are not in love any more, we are very much in love with our business.’ It is true that their comments about each other over the years are based on an extraordinary degree of mutual professional and personal admiration (although when Gabbana once bought a YSL coat, Dolce refused to speak to him for days).
The two designers marked a strong shift in direction with their collection for spring/summer 2008, sending out a series of tulle gowns hand-painted with beautiful floral designs. The designers announced they were moving away from their overtly sexual signature style towards a more sensual approach. The dimensions of the mannequin form on which they designed were changed, Dolce said in an interview with The New York Times: the bust size reduced, the
waist elongated and the hips enlarged. Indeed, just at the point when the pair were in danger of becoming a pastiche of themselves, they found a new lease of life. For autumn/winter 2008, they explored masculine English tailoring; for the following spring/summer, baroque brocades came to the fore. Once again, fashion editors, buyers and high street copyists paid close attention.
Their advertising campaigns still retain a provocative streak: one advertisement was withdrawn from Spain in 2007 after government representatives claimed it encouraged violence against women. The designers expressed bemusement. ‘We play sometimes and we love sexuality,’ said Gabbana, possibly with a twinkle in his eye. ‘We take a risk. People say it is too much, but it depends on the eye.’ Dolce & Gabbana have played the modern fashion game better than most: sales totalling $1.4 billion in 2007 make that clear. Although their relentless plundering of the styles of the past can sometimes create a sensation of ennui even for their most loyal enthusiasts, their energetic ability to reinvent themselves is likely to keep them in the front line of fashion for some time to come.
