Designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have spent much of the summer wooing Madonna – the pop icon wore a series of custom-made lace looks from the Dolce & Gabbana label as she celebrated her recent 66th birthday in Pompeii, and the designers posted various tributes to the artist on social media.
On Saturday, the collaboration reached new heights, as Madonna became both the guest of honour and the inspiration for the Dolce & Gabbana Spring-Summer 2025 catwalk show in Milan, named “Italian Beauty”.
The woman herself manifested on the front row wearing a black lace veil and a jewelled gold crown – the veil was notably never lifted, even to watch the spectacle unfold on the catwalk in front of her.
Around 70 models wearing identikit Madonna wigs and sweatbands then descended a mirrored staircase to parade past the singer. It was a fancy dress party to end all others, the ultimate parade of superfans.
The outfits from 1990’s Blonde Ambition tour were reinvented for the Instagram age on the catwalk. Madonna’s famous blush-pink conical bra formed the basis of dozens of lingerie-based looks, including corseted satin mini dresses and tailored jackets with protruding cups.
The tour’s pinstripe trousers, brogues and brace clips had been spun into new looks too – some suiting-based, others lingerie. Satin Mary-Jane platform heels and seductress coats (sheer trenches, blush patent macs and white faux fur chubbies) completed each look. It was unapologetically fun, rounding off what has otherwise been an at times stoic fashion week in Milan.
No matter that it was Jean Paul Gaultier who first created Madonna’s conical bra, and encouraged her to take a spin on his catwalk in 1992 wearing a lingerie harness and little else. Perhaps the designers consulted him in advance of the tribute.
Dolce and Gabbana have long revelled in pushing the boundaries – one latest invention, a luxury £85 perfume for dogs, was met with inevitable criticism by animal rights groups. The Dolce & Gabbana customer is undeterred – several brought their highly fluffed pooches to watch the show, smelling, of course, like the “Fefé” fragrance’s unmistakable ylang-ylang notes.
Dolce & Gabbana’s beauty empire grossed over £1 billion in the last year. If catwalk shows can serve as inspiration for a whole world of by-products – lipsticks, sunglasses, handbags, perfumes (for humans and pets) – then they are masters of it. Expect an “Italian Beauty” cosmetics range in due course.
And at Versace…
Designer Donatella Versace has been generously throwing open the Versace archives lately. Last week on the red carpet we saw the singer Halsey wearing a slinky, red leopard-print dress that Elizabeth Hurley had originally worn nearly three decades ago. Actress Blake Lively gave another now-“vintage” iridescent gown a spin – one that Britney Spears wore in 2002 to a Versace show.
Exercises like these serve to prove that Versace’s designs really do stand the test of time. Donatella’s specific take on glamour could be described succinctly as “high-octane sparkly” – an aesthetic that there will always be demand for.
Fast forward to her Spring-Summer 2025 show at Castello Sforzesco in Milan on Friday night, and Versace pinpointed an exact moment in time when she had felt joyful, as a period that she personally wanted to revisit.
She took inspiration from her Spring 1997 Versus show – back then she was the designer of the new Versus diffusion collection, while her brother Gianni worked on the mainline. Shown on the catwalk in October 1996, it was less than a year before Gianni was murdered in front of his home in Miami.
“It was a joyful moment,” Versace said at a press conference before the show. “There was freedom, happiness, not too much thinking, and being more casual [when] putting your clothes together.”
She likes to look back on the 1990s, she said, because “there is so much darkness in the world – with this collection, I wanted to bring colour, light, optimism and joy – we have never needed it more”.
Models showed various examples of dopamine dressing: squiggle knitted polo tops; pale-yellow and lilac chiffon layers; metallic floral slip dresses worn with red tights. The heels were high – Versace is devoutly committed, and wore a pair of her tallest platforms to take her bow on the catwalk at the end of the show. Other heels were sculpted to look like perfume bottles and upturned champagne flute stems.
Even though it riffed on the past, this collection didn’t feel at all as though it was recycling old ideas. One of the most forward-thinking pieces was a shimmering gold dress, modelled by Anok Yai, which was seamless and had been created using a 3D printer.
It is exactly the sort of glittery dress that, in another 30 years time, would still read as undoubtedly glamorous – and the stars of the day then should be vying to re-wear it.
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