At last Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have brought their color-saturated designs to San Francisco’s Union Square where they are set amid black lacquer shelves and burgundy velvet drapes in a gleaming new boutique. The Italian fashion house’s Dolce & Gabbana shop at Grant Avenue and Geary Street includes ready-to-wear collections for women—suggestive cuts are juxtaposed with looks that more closely resemble traditional full-skirted Sicilian garb—in addition to the men’s Sartoria line as well as ready-to-wear collections, plus jewelry and eveningwear. The business partners—formerly a couple—founded the house in 1985, and have relied on contrasts for inspiration over the years. They have mined masculine-feminine dualities, paired simple cottons with luxurious silks, even cast young models alongside stately village matrons in print campaigns. But the Dolce & Gabbana look has always revolved around sex appeal. For men this spring, the designers created suit coats printed with birds, taking the Chinese Palace of Palermo as inspiration. The women’s collection riffs on Italian travel posters, straw hats, and the sort of scarves you’d wear while driving a convertible in wine country. The space’s voyeuristic glass facade reveals all manner of shoes, bags, and dresses covered in animal prints, floral motifs, yards of lace, sequins, and intricate embroidery patterns. As the new year begins, the house’s more-is-more aesthetic seems a fitting addition to the Bay Area’s current building boom, and the house’s intricate designs have arrived just in time to grace this March’s Mid-Winter Gala benefiting the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, an evening that will surely be awash in technicolor gowns.

By Elizabeth Varnell

Pictured: San Francisco’s new Dolce & Gabbana boutique.
Photo courtesy of Dolce & Gabbana

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