Conditions were so intense that 'one model fainted,' says Armstrong. Photo / Getty Images
Conditions were so intense that 'one model fainted,' says Armstrong. Photo / Getty Images
Ten years ago, Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce came up with what seemed like a risky scheme. They'd recently closed their cheaper D&G range, which had been profitable and ubiquitous in certain clubbing spots, but was no longer the image they wished to be remembered for. Twenty years into the business they'd self-funded, they decided to launch an alta moda line.
Alta moda is the Italian equivalent of haute couture. It features elaborate, expensive, slow-fashion, custom-made clothes with an almost nerdy emphasis on craft and a cavalier disregard for practicality. And like couture, it requires workrooms of highly skilled artisans.
Most luxury fashion Italian labels had given up on alta moda decades earlier. Even in Paris, gold-plated names such as Chanel and Dior struggled to make money from couture. Entry prices, even in 2012, were around GBP£30,000 ($58,190) for a "simple" dress that could take weeks of fittings until it was ready.
By the early part of the new millenium too few clients had the money or patience to keep all those workrooms going. Couture was a prestige marketing exercise most houses could do without and the number of names still producing couture dwindled from around 25 in the 80s to a handful in 2010.
The stars were out in force at the opulent Syracuse event. Photo / Instagram @dolcegabbana
From Dolce & Gabbana's first alta moda show in the summer of 2012, which they decided to hold not in Milan but in Dolce's native Sicily, they knew they were on to something. That first event was attended by around 100 potential clients – a few Europeans, some Russians and Americans, a smattering of Chinese... and what's incredible, Dolce told me a year later, "is they want alta moda not just for parties, but for every aspect of their life, even gardening and sleeping". Cue the world's most expensive pyjamas.
A decade on, having launched Alta Sartoria for men and Alta Gioielleria, a jewellery line in which size most definitely matters, the duo expanded the event from two nights to five and took the circus to Venice, Portofino, Capri and Naples. Last weekend, the spectacle was, fittingly, back in Sicily. The designers are blessed to have been born in a country with an abundance of ravishing towns that look like stage sets.
The show took place in an 18th-century square on Sicily's South East coast. Photo / Getty Images
Gabbana says their alta moda range now has 750 regular clients. The Russians may be keeping a relatively low profile; travel is still difficult for some Chinese, but right here is living proof that the number of unimaginably large fortunes has ballooned across the globe since 2012. Besides, where there's a will, there's a way to get around restrictions.
Around a dozen super "yachts" (more like the glorified mega gin palaces the Logan family in Succession would feel at home on) dropped anchor in Syracuse, an unassuming resort on Sicily's southeast coast, including the one belonging to Stefano Gabbana, on which Kris Jenner, the Kardashian matriarch, was staying and where, even at midnight, a crowd thronged on the jetty hoping to catch a glimpse of Jenner and her boyfriend Corey Gamble who is, appropriately enough, a talent manager.
Kris Jenner with boyfriend Corey Gamble. Photo / Instagram @dolcegabbana
Jenner's queen bee status was challenged on the second evening when Maria Carey arrived on the arm of Domenico Dolce just before the show started. Not to be outdone, just after it ended, Sharon Stone stepped onto the stage, ostensibly to congratulate the designers, but not before she'd spent seven minutes posing against a balustrade for a flotilla of iPhones. It was a battle of the divas in which the impeccably behaved Dame Helen Mirren, Drew Barrymore and the ever-polite Kitty Spencer could really only be also-rans.
Mariah Carey attended on the second evening alongside Domenico Dolce. Photo / Instagram @dolcegabbana
Celebrities were not invited to that first show in 2012. The designers also imposed a social media ban, assuming any clients would demand discretion around their extravagant spending habits.
Sharon Stone went through several dress changes. Photo / Instagram @dolcegabbana
Wrong. From the start, clients were only too happy to share the cost of their alta moda wedding frock - $581,880 one Russian bride told me five years ago - with the handful of journalists who'd been invited, or divulge how many $193,960-plus frocks they had. A German industrialist revealed she counted her dresses not in individual numbers but by measuring the metres of space they take up.
The 'impeccably behaved' Dame Helen Mirren. Photo / Instagram @dolcegabbana
Even now, when the world is drowning in debt and inflation, they love coming to the alta moda show not just to buy clothes and enjoy the historic locations, but because it has become the biggest billionaires' club on the planet. What do they do between shows and parties? Shop in the pop-up Dolce boutiques which bloom in these resorts temporarily – and network.
The "event" now spans five days with the jewellery presentation and women's and men's shows on separate nights with corresponding dinners, live concerts and after-parties so elaborate they make the Conservative Black and White Ball look like a village hall bring-and-buy sale. Even the Oscars look budget in comparison – the alta moda/sartoria customer does not borrow clothes. And she needs a lot of them, if only to attend these events, which require several outfit changes a day.
The shows themselves are immensely long – the women's, staged in the middle of an 18th-century piazza in Ortigia – the island in the centre of Syracuse – lasted more than an hour and featured a religious procession complete with prelates, nuns, a Virgin Mary (why not?) and a Christ figure – both of whom looked uncannily like models – and 106 looks. One model fainted. The shoes were recklessly high, the heat intense.
Sharon Stone congratulates the designers. Photo / Getty Images
The guests lap up the leisurely spectacle – it gives them more time to dazzle their peers in the outfits they ordered from the last alta moda/sartoria collection. One baby-faced Chinese tech billionaire posed languidly on the catwalk with a woman in a Scarlett O'Hara ball gown. Another woman wore what appeared to be a cupola on each shoulder.
Several had floor-length cloaks. Others, men included, wore crowns and dresses smothered in jewels or crowns. They're not royals. The crowns are from the Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. A man was dressed like a courtier from Louis XIV's Versailles. Another as a monsignor.
No, wait, he really was a man of the cloth. He spent the evening smoking and drinking and is, according to one of the brand's army of PRs, famously partial to a bit of Dolce & Gabbana. "That's Sicily for you," the PR shrugged. Many guests had their own camera crew and hair and make-up artists in tow as they live-streamed to their TikTok and Instagram followers. Picture all the Emma Bovaries out there glued to the unfolding antics.
Conditions were so intense that 'one model fainted,' says Armstrong. Photo / Getty Images
You'd be forgiven for thinking Dolce & Gabbana have taken their clients on a sartorial journey with diminishing returns. How do you outdo a woman dressed as a Roman goddess and men in embroidered silk dressing gowns and crystal-smothered jackets?
Somehow the designers managed. Before the show, the designers said they'd gone back to their roots – lots of black, because it reminded them of the clothes Dolce's Sicilian grandmother always wore, "and because black reminds us of our families", said Dolce. "And it's sexy," he added – a striking juxtaposition worthy of one of Freud's notebooks. The black wasn't exactly sombre, encrusted as it was with gold tubing and embroidery.
Back in Milan they're training up young apprentices to cope with demand. Photo / Getty Images
Mini tuxedo jacket-dresses with shoulders the size of St Peter's in Rome were accessorised with suspenders, sheer black stockings and stilettos in a nod to their earliest collections. Fitted dresses were hand tapestried from nape to hem; others were trimmed with hand-made lace and worn with long veils. Technically it was dazzling. Back in Milan they're training young apprentices to cope with demand. One client told me she was so overwhelmed she cried during the show.
Fitted dresses were hand tapestried from nape to hem. Photo / Getty Images
And everyone had to do it all over again 24 hours later, because it was time for the caravan to move to Marzamemi, a nearby fishing village where Alta Sartoria, the men's show, unfolded by the lapping waves of the Med. If anything, this was brighter and more dazzling than the women's: impressively tailored suits in zinging citrine or electric coral with lashings of fringing, beading and jewels.
Many of the looks were "technically dazzling". Photo / Getty Images
At the end of the second evening, another British journalist and I were ferried into a taxi with a client. We dropped her by a super yacht called Crazy Me which, a quick tunnel into Google revealed, is owned by Naquib Sawris, an Egyptian telecoms multi-billionaire.
'How do you outdo a woman dressed as a Roman goddess?' asks Armstrong. Photo / Getty Images
It was moored near the £150m ($290m) Man Of Steel, which belongs to Barry Zekelman, a – wait for it – steel magnate from the US. "Which boat are you on?'' she asked us. At this level it's hard to comprehend that some people just have to slum it in hotels.
