Dolce & Gabbana

Dolce & Gabbana was founded in 1985 in Milan by Italian designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana as a contemporary Italian luxury fashion house specifically focused on what the founders described as 'a deliberately-Italian-Sicilian-cultural-anchored contemporary-luxury vocabulary anchored to traditional Italian-craft and deliberately-Mediterranean visual culture.' The brand has been one of the defining post-1985 Italian-anchored contemporary-luxury fashion houses. The Dolce & Gabbana vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: deliberately-Italian-Sicilian-cultural-reference tailored separates with deliberately-Mediterranean-aesthetic construction, hand-printed silk-and-cotton dresses with deliberately-traditional-Sicilian-craft-reference motifs (the brand has been continuously focused on Sicilian floral prints, religious-iconographic references, and broader Mediterranean cultural references), hand-embroidered tailored evening wear, the iconic Dolce & Gabbana corset-and-bustier feminine-evening-wear programme, deliberately-Mediterranean-aesthetic ready-to-wear, and a colour palette anchored to washed-black, oxblood, ecru, washed-cream, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, royal-blue, marigold-yellow, and the iconic Sicilian-Italian-luxury-aesthetic colour combinations. The brand is independent and held by the founding partners Dolce and Gabbana plus institutional Italian investors. Dolce & Gabbana operates approximately 300 retail flagship stores globally — anchored to Milan (Via della Spiga — the brand's home flagship), Rome, Paris (Avenue Montaigne), London (New Bond Street), New York (Madison Avenue), Tokyo (Ginza, Aoyama), Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, plus extensive wholesale through Net-a-Porter, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Mytheresa, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, Harrods, the major global luxury department stores, and the broader Asian-luxury-customer distribution. The brand has been one of the defining post-1985 Italian-anchored luxury fashion houses.