D&G

see the slideshow ›

MILAN, September 26, 2005

By Sarah Mower

Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana were in an airy, loved-up kind of mood as they began their 20th-anniversary celebrations with a lacy all-white D&G collection. Their general drift: Emmanuelle seen through a soft-focus Sarah Moon-ish lens, but designed for a teenager's long night out at an Italian seaside disco.

Dolce and Gabbana have been around long enough to be designing for the daughters of their first late-eighties customers. They tackle the job with a cheerful recognition that most of their fashion references will float straight over the heads of their new audience. "Young people never have too much knowledge of the past, so we mixed the old with the hyper-new," said Dolce. What appeared wasn't really an essay on late-seventies film and photography, but more a roundup of current Mediterranean notions about pretty-yet-sexy dressing. Long, short, Empire line, Victorian, broderie anglaise, organza, stretch lace, and flounces, mixed up with pedal pushers and shorts—they had it all covered. Except for the fact that 80 percent of it, of course, was see-through.