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Another fashion week happens after the lights on the Paris haute couture catwalks go out. It comes courtesy of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, who since 2012 have included in their flamboyant repertoire the Alta Moda collections, staged as extravagant multi-day affairs in Italy’s most picturesque locations. The Alta Moda grand tour is a luxurious treat to their community of deep-pocketed clients, who flock from around the world to take part in the designers’ exuberant festivities: They party, mingle with celebrities, and dress up to the nines, while shopping along the way for the next one-of-a-kind addition to their Dolce & Gabbana wardrobes. That price tags often reach to six figures is just a minor bother, shooed away like an annoying mosquito.
This season the Alta Moda caravanserai (“between clients and production, we move around 2,000 people,” they said) landed on the shores of Sardinia, an island dense in history and blessed with stunning natural beauty. It’s also a land of deep-rooted traditions and rituals, some mysterious and fierce, harkening back to its rural prehistoric times. Over the eons, Sardinia was colonized and inhabited by Phaenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, and Saracens; the Spanish Aragonese ruled over its vast, barren landscapes for about four hundred years. It’s upon the island’s visually intricate, ancestral ecosystem of symbols and mythologies rooted in paganism that Dolce & Gabbana drew their inspiration for this year’s Alta Moda.
“We deep-dived into Sardinia’s intriguing world,” the designers said at a press conference before the show, which was staged at the archeological site of Nora, on a promontory of the island’s southern corner. Dating back to the 8th century BC, the ancient city’s ruins made for a metaphysical, almost lunar setting, framing a large scale site-specific artwork by the American artist Phillip K. Smith III. A monumental installation of mirrored askew columns called Nora Mirage, it marked the first-ever commission by the designers of a contemporary artist. When they were scouting for the show’s location, they said they were struck by its surreal atmosphere, as if they had stumbled “into a piazza in one of De Chirico’s paintings.” It has a spare, modern quality to it. “We wanted to bridge the past with the present; we felt that the set-up and the collection should be more contemporary.” Fascinated as they are by Italian folklore, it’d been easy to fall into a pantomime, “but we went the opposite direction,” they said, “going more simple, elegant, with just nods to Sardinian traditions.”
