The city of Milan is accustomed to the disruptions that Fashion Week brings, but the Dolce&Gabbana fall/winter 2025 show today was something else. With construction work on the tracks that run along the street where the label is headquartered and puts on its shows, and the trams that run on them temporarily suspended, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana built an elevated stage in front of their venue. After the models walked down the runway in the theatre inside, they took to the street, at which point they were greeted by thousands of screaming fans and some surprised locals too. It was club night on the Viale Piave at 3:30 p.m., bass notes reverberating for blocks.
The concept this season was “cool girls.” The designers were thinking about the models they know and how they wear their clothes: vintage tees and lacy camisoles, cargos or jeans, and biker boots, with a designer coat thrown over the top of it all. Somehow fully dressed, but as your granny might put it, still scantily clad. “We’ve totally changed the mood,” Gabbana said in the studio. “We took inspiration from Vittoria Ceretti, Irina Shayk, Mona Tougaard—the way they dress in real life, on the street. It’s very spontaneous.”
Other designers have built whole aesthetics on the model-off-duty look. This was a detour for Dolce and Gabbana, who have lately been playing up the yin-yang of their sartorial expertise and sexy black-widow dresses, as well as their Alta Moda haute couture. For those with the experience to remember it, D&G, the wildly popular diffusion line they wound down about a dozen years ago, came roaring back to mind. “Many people ask us about D&G,” Gabbana admitted. “This is the mood, from the 2000s—but a little more high.”
He was referring to the profusion of shearling, treated to look like more luxurious fur, that lined the inside of army coats, denim jackets, and leather bombers, or, in more extroverted fashion, was used for a fringed white poncho and other larger-than-life pieces. The single biggest trend of Milan Fashion Week has been the return of fur (mostly, but not all, shearling), and Dolce and Gabbana have signed on for the revival. Another thing that separated this show from D&G collections of the past was the abundance of crystals; the baggy cargos and jeans embroidered with clusters of stones looked like easy hits.
Like their paparazzi-themed men’s show in January, this one was divided into day and night sections. Three-quarters of the way through, the lights dimmed, and when they came back up, the models had swapped their boots for heels and their slouchy essentials for short slip dresses, more boxy than va-va-voom, done up in yet more crystals. Light bounced off them as they hit the runway. The whole thing was DJ’d by Victoria De Angelis, Maneskin’s bass player, who cued up her as-yet-unnamed, soon-to-be club banger featuring the unforgettable, eyebrow-raising line, “Can you see my tits through my T-shirt?” Scandalised? The cool girls would just roll their eyes.
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