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Sinking maybe $100,000 on a jacket, $20,000 on shoes, or Lord knows how much on a small crocodile case designed solely to carry Champagne might seem decadent. Yet for the super-rich clients of Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Sartoria and Alta Moda collections, that kind of cash is chump change—a micro-slice of expendable currency. And if there were ever a venue designed to incentivize super-rich hands to head for super-rich pockets, it was the venue for Saturday night’s Alta Sartoria show.
Magnificently set into a foothill alongside Lake Como, the Villa Carlotta—an outrageously beautiful home decorated with original sculptures by Canova—is a historical object lesson in you-can’t-take-it-with-you. It was first laid out by a local dynasty of milk merchants, who built the house on ancestral land before their fortune evaporated and they were forced to sell. The new owner had started life as a barber who rose to become a prominent politician under Napoleon, but who later lost Napoleon’s patronage and retired wounded to his house to brood and collect great works of art. After his death it was passed over to relatives, who promptly sold it. The buyer, a Prussian princess, gave it to her daughter, Carlotta, after whom the Villa was named, as a wedding present. Shortly afterward, Carlotta died at age 23. And so it goes.
For a few hours on Saturday evening, the Villa Carlotta passed into the fleeting possession of Domenico Dolce & Stefano Gabbana. They rented the villa from the trust that oversees it to showcase a collection of menswear into which the very fabric of this house and its surroundings had been stitched, embroidered, or painted. Preshow, Dolce said: “When you look at this villa, then you look at the collection, the inspiration is obvious! It has one of the most beautiful gardens in Europe and important, beautiful art. Napoleon was a visitor here. When we saw this place for the first time and learned its history, we loved it.”
As Gabbana described it, the show—which saw the models walk through Carlotta’s marble-floored, fresco-roofed rooms before venturing outside under a pergola toward a string quartet—was populated by a cast of male characters they imagined having once been part of the long life of this house. They included gardeners, who carried baskets of roses and wore either painted T-shirts and shirts in woven straw or one fantastic set of overalls—couture OshKosh—in differently patterned floral silk jacquards. There were pragmatic equestrians who teamed knee-high crocodile boots with wide shorts, and romantic Victorians who swooshed across the marble wearing bottle green or lake blue opera cloaks à la Oscar Wilde. Various suits both painted and embroidered with the flora and fauna to be found in the gardens were hat tips to the 19th-century collectors who had once fluttered through.
Some plainer, but no less rich, ensembles included pale suits, white cashmere henleys, and crocodile blousons teamed with straw hats, a look vaguely reminiscent of Mark Twain (who, when he visited Como, declared that it compared poorly to Lake Tahoe, and observed that many local women had mustaches). Thanks to a heavy emphasis on linen, the tailoring had a softer than usual feeling, even when overlaid with panels of silk and organza to create floral landscapes as impressively drafted as anything on Carlotta’s walls or ceilings. There were a lot of oversize, blouse-like smocks teamed with fringed scarves, both of which came patterned in faded opaque florals. The Napoleon connection was heavily emphasized via a semi-finished white suit embroidered with spoils-of-war insignia, a sequined scarlet T-shirt inlaid with a heavily curlicued N that went accessorized with an imperial scepter, and a closing ermine cloak with a train that ran to five meters: It’s no-less-lavish but easier-to-wear partner was a V-neck ermine sweatshirt a few looks before.
Among the 100 or so models were two young clients, one Chinese, one from the U.S., who had been asked to walk in the show. The American, Thomas J. Henry, was chosen to wear a jacket upon which hundreds of hours had been spent embroidering a perfectly rendered portrait of another great Como house, the Villa d’Este. Preshow, as he sat on a chair by his rack and WhatsApped, I asked him if he knew the price of the piece: He didn’t. Postshow I bumped into him, still wearing the look, on Carlotta’s terrace, hanging with his father (Thomas), mother (Azteca), and sister (Maya).
“Oh, so I found out about the jacket,” he said, naming an eye-watering sum.”
“Wow, so did you get it?”
“No, I wasn’t . . . , ” he started to say, before Maya interjected.
“Yes, you did!” she said. “Dad already bought it.”
As a casually grand gesture, that purchase might seem pretty extreme. Yet standing on that terrace, alongside the architecture, gardens, and art that all resulted from generations of extravagant commitment by so many long-forgotten millionaires, it seemed less startling. Just one more chapter in the history of Villa Carlotta.