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Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana are known for glitz. It's one of their leitmotifs - and alongside their sleek black tailoring, crisply starched white shirts and shiny shiny patent shoes there's always been a few lairy, blare-y printed silks in a kaleidoscope of technicolor hues. So, when they stripped back their mainline to all-encompassing black-and-white this season, the question that immediately sprang to mind was: where has all the ramatazz gone?
Fear not, they were simply saving it for the D&G show, where the urge to decorate roamed free across acres of printed silk. Foulard was the theme - the silken scarves that have knotted the hair of aristocratic matriarchs and caressed the throat of foppish youths since well before Brideshead was revisited. That silk was sliced, diced, patched and stitched into D&G's usual catwalk-flooding, market-swamping four-hundred-or-so piece tsunami of a collection. Hermes may very well be gearing up for a lawsuit - Versace too, actually, given that they staked their claim on the Louis Quinze silk-print pantsuit about thirty years ago. Meshing it with denim, however, brought it back to D&G true: souped-up casualwear for brash Eurotrash youths. That's not a criticism, just an observation.
It was satisfyingly whole-hearted. If Domenico and Stefano play it safe (sometimes too safe) with the retail juggernaught that is their Dolce e Gabbana collection, for D&G they're never afraid to be cheap and cheerful. This collection may have been simplistic, but the singular (read: single) idea they alighted on was worked out good and proper, through every possibly permutation (even the invite was swirled with a damned paisley-print). Often, that can seem too much - here, it was just enough.
