Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana are the most successful design partnership in fashion history.

Since they burst on to the scene in Milan in the eighties, their multi-million-dollar women's line, menswear, underwear, shoes jewellery and swimwear empire has become one of the dominating forces in Italian – and world – fashion. Every year, the opulent and dramatic presentations, in ever-more spectacular locations, of their successful 21st-century haute couture line Alta Moda are rapturously received by the fashion press.

Their hot-blooded, theatrical style is inspired by the Sicily of Visconti's 1963 film The Leopard, by Catholic imagery and by the Italian screen sirens like Sophia Loren and Monica Bellucci who wear the designs captured here by Vogue’s stable of photographers: curvaceous dresses, spectacularly colourful coats, Swarovski-crystal-embroidered corsets, tulle ball-gowns hand painted with beautiful floral images, baroque brocades and lashings of leopard-print.

The Dolce and Gabbana woman – characterised, according to Vogue, as having ‘a life that reaches beyond, complete with fantasy, turmoil and always a story’– is sensual but proper: actress Isabella Rosselini describes ‘The first piece of theirs I wore was a white shirt, very chaste, but cut to make my breasts look as if they were bursting out of it,’ while Madonna, more prosaically, simply says: ‘I like their designs because they make clothes for a womanly body.’

Black, the most powerful and overwhelming non-color, is the symbol of Dolce & Gabbana and encapsulates opposite feelings that attract: sensuality and rigor, tragedy and love.

In this large-format black-and-white book, the great masters of Italian and international reportage are contrasted with the most important fashion photographers, who have interpreted Dolce & Gabbana Black from behind their lenses since the 1980s. These include Helmut Newton, Inez & Vinoodh, Giuseppe Leone, Enzo Brai, Salvo Alibrio, Sergio Larrain, Bruno Barbey, Ellen von Unwerth, Gian Paolo Barbieri, Fabrizio Ferri, and Juergen Teller.

In these photographic masterpieces, which range from advertising campaigns to the most iconic editorials, the stars of cinema, entertainment, and fashion — featuring Monica Bellucci and Isabella Rossellini among others — will alternate with suggestive portraits of ordinary people, some never before seen by the general public and published here for the first time, in a constant dialog that puts Dolce & Gabbana Black at the center.

About the Author:

Domenico Dolce, born in Sicily, near Palermo, in 1958, started to work with his father in the family clothing business while studying fashion design. Stefano Gabbana, born in Milan in 1962, began to work in various fashion studios with a graphic design background. They met when Stefano Gabbana phoned the tailor’s workshop where Domenico Dolce was working; they became life companions and founded the Dolce & Gabbana company. Their debut dates back to October 1985, when the designers presented their first collection to great success. Since then, Dolce & Gabbana has experienced a constant, unstoppable ascendancy.
 

The images in Lin Dan — never before published and taken specially for this book — portray the young man in a previously unseen dimension, at times even brazen and unprincipled. In each of these photographs, Lin Dan appears in ever-different situations, each of which interpret a specific role: from the seducer to the Greco-Roman hero, from the gladiator to the great Imperial Emperor, from the aristocratic dandy to the Neapolitan street urchin.

About the Authors:

Domenico Dolce is a fashion designer who started the Dolce&Gabbana brand with Stefano Gabbana in 1985. Today, their fashion lines are available in 451 stores in forty countries. He has dedicated himself to photography with the same passion and enthusiasm that he has for fashion.

The first book celebrating Dolce & Gabbana Alta Gioielleria, a kaleidoscope of creativity in which formal invention is accompanied by rediscovery of historical Italian craftsmanship.

Dolce & Gabbana Alta Gioielleria (High Jewelry) inaugurated its first collection in Taormina in 2012. Ten years after that memorable date, the fashion house has decided to celebrate this precious universe of art, beauty, and knowledge in a book for the first time.

The creations of Dolce & Gabbana Alta Gioielleria have always been unique pieces. While the exceptional quality of gems and diamonds is certified by the most renowned international gemological institutes, the goldsmithery — which is carried out entirely by hand in the brand’s workshops by skilled goldsmiths — reinterprets highly refined processes, such as milgrain, filigree, and twisted wire.

It embodies an extraordinary heritage of tradition and know-how, forging material to transform it into a work of art. Miniatures, enamels, corals, and marvelous gems from the most important deposits in the world and magnificent diamonds, some of which are characterized by the unprecedented Dolce & Gabbana cut, are the absolute stars of this volume. Edited by Carol Woolton, it reveals the unique creations of Dolce & Gabbana Alta Gioielleria to the general public for the first time.

About the Author:

Carol Woolton is a global industry leader in the luxury sector, a contributing editor at British Vogue, and host of the podcast If Jewels Could Talk. As a jewelry historian, she has curated exhibitions internationally. 

For this volume, Dolce + Gabbana have decided to highlight the sensual photographic work of Mariano Vivanco, one of the world's leading photographers. Vivanco collects a series of photographs that celebrate the beauty and vigor of the male body at its most perfect.