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Pooling their savings—some $2,000—Dolce and Gabbana signed up to show their small collection with a group of four other young designers. Word spread around Milan, a few editors and buyers took note, and by March 1986 they were staging their first solo show, “Real Women.” Dolce's sister Dorotea and his brother Alfonso worked the door. Joan Burstein of the London boutique Brown's came and snapped up the collection of romantic, Sicilian-inspired dresses and strictly tailored pantsuits that were very much in contrast to both Armani and Versace—then the opposing poles of fash ion in Milan—and to the dark, asexual stuff the Japanese were showing in Paris.
“There were two extremes,” Burstein remembers. “ There was tailoring and corsets and the sexy bits and then these marvelous full-skirted dresses, which I thought were so Neapolitan. We didn't know then that Domenico was Sicilian.”
Today it's hard not to recognize Dolce's Sicilian roots, so ingrained are they in the fashion iconography of the late 1980s and '90s: Isabella Rossellini posing as an actress in the style of the neorealistic cinema that her father founded; Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington dressed as showgirls falling in love with Italian boys in New York City's Little Italy; Monica Bellucci re-enacting Fellini's La Dolce Vita. The designers' ad campaigns alone—most shot by Steven Meisel—are a lesson in vintage Italian style.
Twenty years later, Dolce & Gabbana, the brand, still has only two shareholders: Dolce and Gabbana. The company is still very much a family affair too. Dorotea and Alfonso Dolce are directors of Dolce & Gabbana Luxembourg S.á.r.l, which controls the empire, and of Dolce & Gabbana Srl (based in Milan). Dolce is CEO of the latter, while Gabbana is the chairman. Stefano's brother Maurizio also works for the company, although not on the corporate side.
With more than 100 boutiques worldwide and over 2,000 employees, Dolce & Gabbana S.á.r.l. has become a global fashion powerhouse. To prove it, the boys recently bought and renovated the Metropol, a former cinema in Milan that will serve as their show space and a sort of epicenter to the empire. An empire that still makes more than 58% of its revenue from ready-to-wear at a time when most luxury fashion brands make up to 80% of their profits from leather goods.
Although big luxury conglomerates have come calling, Dolce and Gabbana have never even considered selling out. They turned away suitors like LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, and Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole when they were running the Gucci Group. Maintaining total control of the business they founded has, Gabbana says, been essential for their creativity and way of working.
“Freedom means not having anything that forces you to do what you don't want to do,” says Dolce. As to how the two divide the task of designing, it's similar to the way they speak, finishing each other's sentences. While Dolce is more hands-on—he could tailor a suit by age 7—Gabbana is more attuned to street trends. It has always been thus; ever since the street-smart Gabbana became entranced by Dolce's southern Italian roots and began embroidering upon that exoticism—the romance, the corsets—forcing Dolce to re-examine a Sicilian heritage that has become the leitmotif of the brand.