The Italian design duo Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana.
This season Dolce & Gabbana celebrated the 20th anniversary of their menswear line with an exhibition at their home in Milan.
The celebration included a multimedia exhibition, a dazzling fashion show, and a gala featuring a number of A-list guests: Juliette Binoche, Morgan Freeman, Matthew McConaughey and Camilla Alves.
Though the Italian design duo Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have not been to China yet, they are keen to do so.
"We have not been able to come to China yet, but we would like to do it soon. From what we understand, the Chinese consumer is a very careful and well-informed one. Because he can have access to everything he wants, he has learned how to chose according to his own taste and personality," Gabbana says in an e-mail interview with China Daily.
Dolce agrees. He believes Chinese men are catching up with fashion trends and creating their own styles.
"Nowadays, consumers all over the world are very similar. They all go and buy at the same places for the same products, which are available at the same time everywhere. Today is really different from the past when certain things could only be bought in the boutiques of via Monte Napoleone or in Paris and New York," Dolce says.
Dolce & Gabbana now owns less than 10 boutique stores in China. At the end of May, it opened the largest retail store in Shanghai's luxury-gathering Plaza 66.
The brand offers a "metropolitan style" for Chinese men: low-waist jeans, bleached and shredded pants, narrow suits, sexy vests and sportswear shoes.
The pair's great success lies in their understanding of what people want from them. Gabanna says the underlying principles have remained the same since the beginning: sartorial tradition mixed with Sicilian aesthetic, through the use of technology, playing with contrasts, a lot of research on proportions and materials and attention to details.
"Dolce & Gabbana has never had a real boom. It has grown little by little, season after season," he adds.
"But at a certain point, we were tempted to explore new ways, and this exploring was useful to understand who we are and what we can do and we like to do," Dolce suggests.
The duo says their inspiration comes from everyday life, a movie, a song, or people walking down the street.
According to a poll in sohu.com, 84 percent of Chinese males believe Italian and French fashion labels provide the best quality and catch the latest trends. Gabbana says their brand's spirit is "deeply Italian, or better, Sicilian," and that is why their brand is the apple of many Chinese men's eyes.
