Dolce and Gabbana Dress a Piece of Art

JE sent me a gorgeous black cotton structured Dolce and Gabbana dress. She found it in 2003 at a thrift store, with trademark excellent construction. The waist has old-fashioned bone ‘stays’ in the iconic corset shape. She asked, what a high style designer dress like this is worth?

Dolce and Gabbana, a premier style line, designed wonderful clothing for twenty plus years. I suspect this dress did not come ‘off the rack.’ A handwritten tab in the lining shows the full names of the two designers spelled out.

2018 Scandal

Both men, who met in a Milan Club in 1982, are no strangers to tangles with the press. To celebrate their show in China in 2018 they posted an Asian model eating Italian food with chopsticks on Instagram. Social Media came down hard. Pundits wrote about the disconnect between what the world thought of D&G couture in the 1990s, disruption and scandal, and what the new WOKE world of 2020s thinks of couture—and how to express it in visual imagery. D&G cancelled the Chinese fashion show and detractors demanded that Dolce and Gabbana disclose workplace conditions and become transparent with their labor issues. Accountability? And who then decides?

In the 1990s any press about a designer fashion brand meant good press. The great icons of the disruption days, the bad boys, dressed models in almost anything outré: Galliano, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and Karl Lagerfeld. The latter celebrated at the MET this month.

Dolce and Gabbana lost business from the Instagram posting, yet former press scandals brought them business. For example the risqué 1992 line called Gangster Chic, and Madonna’s 1500 coreset-based, sexy costumes designed for her shows in the 1990s. As of 2021 Dolce and Gabbana stands in the public’s good graces again. They designed a fabulous gown for a make-up entrepreneur of color for the MET Gala. Her gown made a huge hit as an anti-racist statement. Some of the young ones of the English royal family wore Dolce and Gabbana to mourn the Queen’s death. The young Lady Louise Windsor wore their black dress to the funeral.

Dolce and Gabbana 1980-90s Chain of Successes

They named their Milanese first show in 1985 Donna Verre (real women) because the pair had no money for models. They asked neighborhood women to model and begged family for money to buy fabric. This breakthrough show made them famous. In their 1990 show The Leopard they found their artistic voice. By then, with this ‘look,’ referencing the Italian films of the 1940s, with glomus sexy garments based on films such as The Leopard, directed by Luchino Visconti, they began to export garments to US and Japan. They made $500M in 1990, less than ten years after their first show.

JE’s dress echoes two influences. One the corset, and two the 1940-50 elegant, form-fitting hourglass shape. In the 1990s the famous fashion designer Rubenstein called their “slip dress,” named the “Sicilian Dress,” one the hundred most iconic dresses in history. It referenced 1940-50 Italian cinema stars filmed in their undergarments—slinking in form fitting “slips,” as those worn by Sophia Loren.

D&G Influenced Art Forms

They also allowed “other” art forms to influence them. They stayed on the forefront of technology to do so. Their runway in 1993 appeared on the INTERNET only, and twice in roles in the movies, designing a video for Duran Duran in the 1990s. In the 2000s they dressed stars for international tours: Madonna, Missy Elliott, Beyonce, Mary J Blige, Kylie Minogue. They became the first to design for plus size women, and the first to show two men kissing in an ad for their men’s collection. In 2021 they created a nine piece runway show of a collection ONLY offered as NFTs. Some of the ‘garments’ designed included “Glass Suit,” and “Impossible Tiara.” The show sold for $5.7million.

Thus, with the shape of the dress and the built in corset, JS owns a piece of art by a high fashion design team that OWNED the 1990s and early 2000s. The value of the dress at an online seller such as the Real Real is $2,000.