First: The TRULY BONKERS clothes in this slideshow include pyramid hats. Some of which I have stared at for AGES to try and figure out where the eyeholes are. (Those blocks of dots must be… secret visibility areas?) Do not miss.
Second: Dolce & Gabbana made a splash this season by partnering with Kim Kardashian on the runway show and concurrently making $200 shirts with photos of her eating a bowl full of spaghetti, snacking on pizza in a car, or standing in front of photographers with some gelato while attempting a Marilyn vibe. (They are sold out.) Cue rapturous applause from the industry, everyone loves them again, yada yada yada. More quietly, they have been helping smaller designers, beginning with the collaboration with Harris Reed on Iman’s Met Gala headpiece, and now assisting Matty Bovan by offering him “corsetry, denim, and accessories reissued from the Dolce & Gabbana archives” and lending him cash, seamstresses, and other resources.
I’m all for extending a hand to new designers, but D&G sure seems hell-bent on rehabbing its image without ever acknowledging why its image needs rehabbing. (For a primer on D&G’s problems, you can start here.) I bring it up here mostly because, from a PR perspective, it’s interesting to me what they are doing versus what they aren’t — namely, from what I can see, sincerely apologizing; they did issue one to its Chinese customers, but in doing so blamed it all on other people/hackers. I’m reminded of a great piece Fashionista did last year that lays out a lot of the charitable endeavors they’ve participated in since, and grapples with the question of what truly matters and how much. For example, it’s good to extend a hand to the smaller businesses around them, at least? Maybe it doesn’t matter whether they are doing it for the right reasons, as this is not The Bachelor and nobody is getting perfunctorily engaged at the end. Then again, why did nothing else ever matter to the celebrity clients willingly acting as their walking billboards? It’s a fascinating issue.
