Designs on Italian family for Dolce and Gabbana

Italian fashion designers Domenico Dolce (right) and Stefano Gabbana. Picture / Reuters

Nearly six months have passed since they confirmed the persistent rumours that they were no longer lovers. But this week Italy's most famous gay ex-couple, the fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Steffano Gabbana, announced that they were seriously broody about having children.

Eyebrows will be raised from Rome to Milan. Adoption by gay couples is illegal in Catholic Italy, as is adoption by lone would-be parents. Undaunted, the pair appeared on the cover of Italian Vanity Fair for its August issue yesterday, posing in the garden of the villa in Milan they still share, surrounded by infants.

The babies were borrowed for the shoot - in one of the pictures inside, the most boisterous of them beams at the camera while yanking at Gabbana's sizeable Milanese conk - but the accompanying interview is a long meditation on how much they would both like a family.

"Of course I would like a son," says Dolce, 46, himself the child of a tailor from a village outside Palermo. "A child is innocence, purity. The child represents the future ... I would like to have not one but five, 10, a football team. I like big families, with chaos at the dinner table, the noise of plates and glasses, a real family."

Dolce's vision of the classic, turbulent southern Italian family, presided over by himself but with no mamma in sight, was only the latest provocation from the brilliant designers who have made a speciality of teasing, outraging and sending up their own culture since bursting onto the Milan fashion scene 20 years ago next month.

As elsewhere, homosexuals are abundant in Italy's fashion industry but, faced with the big guns of the Church, discretion has generally been the better part of valour: Valentino, for example, the grand old man of the business, only came out last year, at the age of 72.

Dolce and Gabbana, by contrast, flaunted their sexual preference, and the fact that they were a loving couple, from early in their careers. Trashing convention is part of the exhilaration of what they do. Their work has always been a celebration of what it means to be Italian.

But, whether inspired by baroque church architecture, the lingerie of southern grannies or the stiletto-sharp suits of the Mafia, their tongues were always firmly in their cheeks. They were selling a high camp version of the bel paese to the world - and their compatriots were often not amused. But what did they care?

Now they are at it again. Although both men describe themselves in the Vanity Fair interview as "credenti" (believing Catholics), their colloquy on gay parenting hits Italy at a highly sensitive moment, with the Catholic Church flexing its muscles as never before on the issue of sexual mores.

Until recently, Italy had the most permissive legal environment in Europe for IVF treatments - one of the obvious ways, via a co-operative fertile woman, for gays to acquire a child.

Then last year the devoutly Catholic Health minister introduced a new law prohibiting all but the most restrictive uses of donated sperm. From being the Wild West of fertility treatment, Italy reverted (in the view of proponents of greater liberality) to the Middle Ages.

A couple of months back, liberals sponsored a referendum to strike the legislation down. But after an aggressive campaign by the Church urging people to abstain, it failed miserably.

Led now by a Pope even more rigorously conservative than the late John Paul II, the Church has also made its hostile views on gay marriage extremely clear. Many Italians resent the increasingly bold interference of the Church in their political life.

The ideas of the pair about parenthood are very different. While Dolce dreams of adopting his host of children as a single person, a la Mia Farrow - something that is banned by law in Italy - Gabbana, 42 and Milanese, would be happy with an only child, but insists on the necessity of a woman in its life.

"I want to give my son a house and a family. I want him to have a mamma, who could live upstairs or in another house, as happens with parents who are separated. But it's vital for the child to have both a father and a mother figure," he says.

In their glittering careers, parenthood is one fulfilment that has eluded them.

"The child represents the future, everything new that is coming," enthuses Dolce. "My mother always said..." "Babies smell sweet, but old people stink,'"

Gabbana interpolates. "I learnt that from your mother, too..."

"The baby...is the essence of purity," Dolce coos. "How could one do any harm to a baby? To educate one, to succeed in passing on positivity and love, these must be the things that makes a person happiest."

Yet in Italian society as presently constituted, this satisfaction is denied them both. "I have this little handicap of being gay," Dolce goes on, "and having a child is something I am not allowed. I could adopt one or contrive it in some way abroad, but I am paralysed with the fear that the child would feel it had been used."

Of his desire for a single son, Gabbana says: "I want only one child because I would like him to have all my attention, all my affection. I'm 42; when I was 28 I wasn't mature, now I have developed the patience that I didn't have before ... I would dedicate much more of my life to my son than to my work. I would get into the office at 11 and leave at 5.30. I would take him back and forth from the day care centre, take him to the park. Why not?"

Dolce: "Exactly, why not?"

Gabbana: "You know why not. Because as a believer I'm conflicted, even if I don't have anything religious about me."

He spells out his qualifications for the woman he seeks as his putative child's mother. "I am looking for a woman who would have the same ideas as me about educating and bringing up a son. She wouldn't have to be a friend. I'm looking for a decent and respectable person to share the journey. We'd do it by IVF treatment. There are lots of places where one can do it, even Switzerland."

Both men see drawbacks to the option of adopting a child. But whatever route they take, Dolce and Gabbana will have to leave Italy if they are to acquire the joys of parenthood.

- INDEPENDENT