The gilded world of Dolce and Gabbana The Dolce & Gabbana label is the lovingly nurtured wildchild of fashion's greatest double act. Luke Leitch gains access to the Domenico and Stefano show. Through the velvet catwalk curtain emerge Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana - the Italian fashion twosome who have just this minute presented the latest variation of their signature duet on sex and Sicily - to make their way back downstairs together. It is only moments since they took their post-show bow - quickly, with arms linked and a half wave from Domenico - and Pavarotti still thunders spine-tinglingly from the sound system. Beyond that curtain the final stragglers among the several-hundred-strong audience of buyers and editors lurch up from their velvet seats and head away, to squint through the unseasonably bright February sunshine and find their drivers amid the throng of bloggers on the tram-filled Milan street outside. Stefano Gabbana backstage at the autumn/winter 2013 show. Photo: Jason Lloyd-Evans Below, in the basement of the Metropol Theatre on Viale Piave, there has been a sudden shift in atmosphere. The battalion of backstage photographers has trundled its equipment trolleys away. The models no longer moon self-consciously about for their benefit, or stand with motionless solemnity as Domenico and Stefano perform last-minute adjustments to the clothes - tugging a gusset here, tweaking the angle of a pastel-flowered alice-band there - but are divesting themselves of these Sicilian Baroque-inspired clothes (sexily somehow simultaneously vampish and virginal) or smoking on the terrace outside. The clothes have nearly all been whisked from the room, placed quickly but carefully into white plastic wrapping, boxed and then pushed out and away to be transported to the showroom on Via Goldoni for the first buying and editorial re-see appointments tomorrow. The blogger Bryan Boy wanders around wearing a pair of women's vegetable-print trousers from the spring collection, taking photographs. It is still extremely noisy, but instead of Domenico bellowing vainly for ' silenzio! ', or black-T-shirted production staff screaming for girls to join the line-up ('Kinga! Ava! AVA!'), the soundtrack is post-climactic. Prosecco corks pop (the designers always pour their team a glass after the show) and there is raucous, 'bravo!'-flecked, star-struck applause when Dame Helen Mirren appears alongside backstage regular Monica Bellucci. The presence of Mirren, who drops her leopardprint Dolce & Gabbana handbag as she lifts her arms to return the applause, has left Tabitha Simmons, the designers' show-stylist of five years, all aflutter. Look! Helen Mirren! Amazing! Amazing!' she says in a rare old flap. 'I'm so overexcited!' Domenico Dolce backstage at the autumn/winter 2013 show. Stefano - the taller one, who is in his usual uniform of jeans, artificially beaten-up boots, shirt and waistcoat - comes up through the crush to embrace a small elderly lady with immaculately fixed grey hair who happens to be standing beside me. 'My mother - un giornalista inglese ,' he introduces us, then is dragged off towards La Bellucci. Mrs Gabbana and I beam bewilderedly at each other, then she says ' un bravo figlio ' and flutters her hand at her fur-clad heart. Domenico (his outfit is similar, but for the dark tailored trousers he is favouring over jeans) approaches. During the past few months - first at a lunch at the end of last year, and then in fittings and rehearsals for both the men's and this women's collections, and even at the San Siro stadium for the Milan derby - I have spent a fair bit of time with both Dolce and Gabbana. Domenico, marginally the quieter of the two, is an intense man perpetually in motion, whose bespectacled eyes seem always narrowed in concentration, whether assessing the cut of a coat or the tone of a question. Now, although smiling, he looks unusually detached, almost dazed. Is he all right? 'You know,' he says, 'when we have that line and then the models go out on to the catwalk, I get a very strange feeling. Because when those girls go, my job is finished. I don't even want to look at the clothes, because now they are not mine. They are for everyone, not a secret any more. It's like your baby has grown up, got big, packed the luggage and gone to Australia. So now I feel blank. I leave the show in a bad way - like a depression. Photo time for the designers and their models backstage. The idea that Dolce & Gabbana, both the company and its clothes, are the 'child' of the two men who created it recurs repeatedly. It is, for instance, the explanation both offer when, back at that lunch, in the animal-print wallpapered room they dine together in every day, I put down my soup spoon (the broth is Domenico's diet food: Chinese cauliflower, courgette and black rice), stroke the head of their youngest labrador, Toto (who is nuzzling my leg in hope of scraps), and ask whether the end of their sexual relationship was cataclysmic enough to make them consider ending their working relationship too. 'No, never,' Stefano says after a pause. I felt pain... very painful. But I did not want to lose what we had built together. Domenico adds, 'Like when people divorce they don't want to kill their baby.' 'In fact,' Stefano says brightly, 'we were a really good example for any couple - gay or straight -because so many times when a love story ends you eat all the house, all the money.' The end of their affair emerged in 2005 when Stefano alluded to it in an interview, but the split itself happened, they say, three years previously. When we were in love it was private. And it was also private when we broke up. Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani congratulates Dolce after the show. By 2002 the company/child they could have 'killed' in the fallout had already grown into one of Italian fashion's most momentous commercial juggernauts. The Dolce & Gabbana brand (so titled, Stefano says, simply because that is what was scrawled on the Plexiglassed intercom label outside their rented office when they were asked for a title on the eve of their first collection) is a second-generation phenomenon of the Milan fashion boom: the Apple to Giorgio Armani's Microsoft. In the 1990s it grew with great speed, partly riding the aesthetic pendulum that swung away from the puritanism of the Japanese minimalists to a new, far sexier angle. Linda Evangelista, who had already gone blond for their Love collection (spring 1991), saw the La Dolce Vita collection the year after and phoned her fellow freshly minted supermodels.Cindy Crawford, Carla Bruni, Helena Christensen, Naomi Campbell and Tatjiana Patitz all bowled up, then agreed to walk in the show in exchange for clothes. Inspired by Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren in It Started in Naples and La Dolce Vita itself, the clothes were, well, very Dolce & Gabbana:black corsets with stockings and suspenders; tight, high shorts; ruched sheath dresses; sexy little biker jackets; leopardprint and lace aplenty. READ: Dolce and Gabbana make Woody Allen cameo Of all the gay designers in fashion (a jostling crowd), Dolce & Gabbana consistently display the most red-bloodedly heterosexual of visions - their women have curves and verve and attract men, while their strapping men in precisely conceived tailoring (or sometimes simply underpants and a pout) attract women. 'Yes, I am gay, and I prefer men, but this is a sexual thing and not a mentality,' Stefano says. I love woman because she is woman; the breasts, the hips, the waist - the femininity. And I love the masculinity of a man. Maybe this is the reason we make a man like a man and a woman like a woman. That hormonally potent blueprint has an effect. We get many letters from people who say, thanks to you I found my husband, or my lover. They send us wedding pictures. From that La Dolce Vita collection in 1992 a Cindy Crawford corset shot gained particular mileage in the press. Madonna wore the collection a lot, then commissioned them to costume design her tour in 1993. Thus Dolce & Gabbana's ascent to becoming the fashion, fragrance and accessories behemoth it is today - my unscientific survey suggests it wins more magazine covers than any other fashion house, and reported turnover in 2011 was €1.13 billion - began in earnest. The very beginning, though, came 10 years earlier. The Sicilian Baroque collection was inspired by the grandiose extremes of 17th-century Sicilian architecture and decoration. Domenico Dolce was born in a Sicilian village called Polizzi Generosa in 1958 to a tailoring family. He says he cut his first pair of trousers aged seven. At college in Milan, as fashion there boomed, he concedes he was an enthusiastic victim of it. Like bloggers today, molto , too much. I had every day a different look, 20 pairs of trousers. By 1981 he was the first assistant to a designer named Giorgio Correggiari. One day the telephone rang. On the other end was Stefano Gabbana (born Milan, 1962, to a printer father whose ill health, Stefano says, explains his vitamin-popping hypochondria, and that charming, chest-patting mother, who worked cleaning and ironing). Stefano had spent the summer before working as a dancer and general life-and-soul-of-the-party alongside a transgender actress named Eva Robin's (sic) at a club called Bella Blu in Taormina, Sicily. Not long afterwards he realised that his studies as a graphic designer were in vain and that he wanted to work in Milan's gold-rush fashion industry. A friend gave him Correggiari's number, and when he called for a job Domenico came on the line. 'I was busy,' Domenico says. But I said, "Tonight we organise a party for the band Imagination." Do you remember Imagination?...' Stefano: ' Just An Illusion !' Domenico: '... at a club called No Ties. I said if you want to come, perhaps we talk. And I described myself. Identifying Domenico in No Ties proved a cinch for Stefano, for Domenico was going through one of his fashion-victim phases and was dressed as a Catholic priest. 'It was horrible,' he confesses, then recoils mid soup-sip when asked if he has any photos we could use in this piece. Domenico talked fashion and Stefano - who says he only really knew about Fiorucci - didn't have a clue. Afterwards, though, Stefano came in and did some sketches, and the pair started to work together. At first that was the extent of their relationship; there was no immediate ka-boom moment. No! Stefano says. He was a priest! I cannot marry! 'No,' Domenico agrees. It was slowly. I try. One day I said, OK, ciao: maybe yes, maybe no, maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. When I said ciao it was ready. 'I am a serious guy,' Stefano says. Not a bitch. After, then I become a bitch! 'Yes, look at that face,' Domenico says (in tones heavy with irony). (Two months later, after a men's show rehearsal at the Metropol, as Domenico is next door overseeing an editorial shoot for a group of Chinese models, Stefano reveals that that night in No Ties was not the first time Domenico had spotted him. When I met him the first time he said, "Ah, were you in Taormina last summer?" He had seen me when I was working there.') The pair fell for each other, and started to work together too. They freelanced, anonymously, for companies such as MaxMara, and saved cash to present their own collections. An early attempt mostly made by Domenico (called Donna, Donna, presented on mannequins eating spaghetti) went down well with the press but, they only later discovered (and still bitterly recall), had been undermined by a commercial manager who had dismissed them as 'donkeys' when asked for an assessment by the factory they had persuaded to produce it. Manufacturing was still their problem when their big break came in 1985. Beppe Modenese, then in charge of the Milan Fashion Week calendar, had heard of the young designers and offered them a third of a slot on a new faces show at 9am on a Saturday in February 1986. 'We cried,' Stefano says. It was like getting to the Olympics. You see the calendar and it say, "Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Gianfranco Ferre..." we cried. They accepted (of course), ordered material and went in search of a factory - yet after two months could find none willing to work with them. In those days the best Italian producers, who would also be able to help them distribute, were unwilling to take on unknowns. So in high dudgeon they sent a letter cancelling the fabrics, and retired to Domenico's village, Polizzi Generosa, for Christmas. There his parents, sister and brother-in-law (who ran a small factory) agreed to produce the collection on spec. Without fabrics, though, production was impossible. But in January the supposedly cancelled material arrived. The cancellation letter had evaporated in a strike. 'We believe in fate and destiny,' Stefano says, 'because there have been many events like this for Domenico and me.' The ensuing collection, Geometrissimo, earned Dolce & Gabbana a permanent slot on the Milan Fashion Week roster. From there, slowly at first and then faster and faster and faster, they grew. That 'donkey' judgment still rankles today. I know the background - it is convoluted fashion-politics related to another big Milan fashion house, and irritatingly off-the-record - but even now, Stefano says, when they are gazillionaire, private-jet-setting superstars, they still have plenty of slings and arrows to deal with. 'We ate shit at the beginning,' Stefano tells me in January, after a fitting for the men's collection, 'a lot of shit. Now, too, we eat shit - different shit. He is referring, I suspect, to the ongoing wrangles over Dolce & Gabbana's tax affairs. Although charges of evading taxes on the sale of their brands to a holding company had already been thrown out of court, on the evening after our lunch the Italian Supreme Court overturned their acquittal. The next day Stefano tweeted, 'It's really true that in Italy they do whatever they want, whenever they please. Maybe it would be better to leave the country. This did not go down well in some quarters, although there were supporters too. But Stefano deleted the tweet, and tells me he no longer feels free to vent his spleen as freely as he once did online. 'I was spontaneous,' he says ruefully. But, you know, we do this because we love it... We are not obsessed by money, we are rich already. Whatever the result of their taxation problems - currently in the hands of their lawyers and, they say, a situation they heartily hope will evaporate as they are positive they have acted entirely within the law - Dolce & Gabbana employs thousands of Italians and is predicated on an idealised vision of Italian-ness, from those bodiced, heaving-bosomed signorinas to the tank-topped, lip-curled, white-panted uomos, that is hard to imagine could convincingly be produced offshore. Domenico and Stefano own equal shares in the company, and there is a smallish (understood to be about 10 per cent) proportion that is owned by the Dolce family, who were the only ones willing to produce that first collection. Now, both hovering around the 50 mark, the designers are thinking about their 'child' and its future beyond them. 'My ambition and Domenico's,' Stefano says, 'is to make one style for the rest of our life. We will die, but people will look in a book and see a picture and say, "This is Dolce & Gabbana style." This is the goal. This is why they last year absorbed D&G, the thematically promiscuous second line that riffed on everything from cowboys to picnics, into the main Dolce & Gabbana label. The initialled logo survives, but incorporated into the main collections instead of demanding its own bells-and-whistles production each season. So far the designers have used the time they have gained to push the brand's product upwards, with a fine jewellery line dripping with crosses and icons. 'We are more mature now,' Stefano says. We have a clearer idea than we did before. When we started we wanted to become a big maison, to make everything. Day by day that came true, so now we want to focus on it, refine it. 'We have the possibility,' Domenico says with careful vagueness, 'to develop in a different way in the future.' In the meantime, they will go on living on separate floors of the same building, Stefano with the three labradors, and Domenico alone, though they have lovers. Together, but sometimes apart, they continue bickering intensely about shirts and skirts and covers and campaigns. During those arguments the assistants scatter next door to where the pizza, cheese and tiramisu is laid out as Stefano explodes then quickly gets over it while Domenico explodes, slowly calms, then broods on the matter for much longer. Just like their tendency to be ultracritical - 'That jacket is shit! SHIT!' - about a garment that might end up opening a collection, this is a gesticulation in their personal dialogue; the jacket certainly isn't shit - and the arguments are rarely serious. Stefano again: 'I know we are lucky. Just for one thing, to have met each other. It is so difficult to find a friend, to find - come si dice? - a wife or a husband. But when you meet important people, like he is to me and like I am to him, this is luck.