Dolce & Gabbana S/S 2018

Mood board: The night before the show, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana hosted an impromptu, intimate display of their more sartorial collection at The Bar Martini. In sharp contrast, their approach to the mainline was to stage-manage an inferno of influence, with 106 looks each modelled by a roll-call of Insta-somebodies. The conflab around showing fashion on ‘real’ bodies (and by association, ‘real’ people) reached new, headier heights as walking for Dolce were the Insta-famous, the Insta-hot and the Insta-oh. Pierce Brosnan’s son Dylan, Bill Clinton’s nephew Tyler and Marlon Brando’s grandson, Tuki, all made an appearance.
 
Best in show: The collection was as eclectic as the casting. Entitled ‘King Of Hearts’, it was dedicated to the raft of millennials who walked the show to a playlist of chart roaring, auto-tuned pop songs lamenting unrequited love. Fittingly, hashtags about love and life were emblazoned on almost everything from cropped bomber jackets to t-shirts and shawl-collar blazers. Trainers and jackets were graffitied with impish irreverence too. Standout was the Dolce & Gabbana playing-card king motif in many dizzying iterations, printed on silk and cut into nifty pyjama suits.
 
Scene setting: It isn’t clear if this millennial frivolity has a fiscal return, but outside of the show venue – on the fringes of the virtual world – scores of flustered teenage fans screamed and crushed into one another to snatch a view of their favourite It Boy. The combined following of those who walked in the show reaches well over a jaw-dropping 35 million. Elsewhere, leopards, tigers and snakes appeared across shirts and heavily embroidered on jackets. Needless to say, both online and off, it’s a jungle out there.