Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda spring/summer 2014

Floral fantasy at Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda spring/summer 2014

The impressive salons had been transformed into a nineteenth-century rose garden, with pergola frames and arbors twined with soft pink and mauve roses and greenery. The girls wafted through this poetic garden, with silk flowers of course as topknots in their Ingres hairstyles—like figures in an Impressionist painting.

 The Dolce & Gabbana  duo has developed real atelier art pieces—elaborate and playful patchworks of textile and embroidery used to create delightfully naïf “flowers in a vase” pictures. Meanwhile the superb cutwork lace effects, cut out of stiff silks and then laboriously hand-stitched, remain another house signature, in tea rose, beige, and jet black.

There was even an hourglass minidress of purple velvet-covered wire clustered with posies of violets. And then there were Persian lamb suits, in idiosyncratic colors like chrome yellow, prune, and mushroom gray, with double golden sable collars.

For the Viscontian finale, two vast skirted tulle ballgowns swept by, representing Innocence and passion, respectively—the first in pale melting-pink roses scattered on tea-stained nets, the latter in crimson and magenta flowers on black. The bride, meanwhile, had a Renaissance look with double, creamy satin billowing from an empire waist and a flower bed of pastel blooms scattered over it.
The accessories are extraordinary: dainty, little, stiletto-heeled shoes on a filigree of real spun gold, and mid-century parures fit for Verdi’s La Traviata in precious metals and stones, with carved coral cameos and exquisite micro mosaics.