Sigmund Freud explained our personalities as comprising three distinct parts. The id is the impulsive pleasure seeker, luxuriating in beauty and repulsed by pain. This was the part that the inhabitants of the wealthy Greek-populated city of Sybaris gave themselves over to as they became the most devoted hedonists in human history and forged the paradigm for modern-day rakes and playboys, from Oscar Wilde to Taki Theodoracopulos. Then there’s the super-ego, the judgmental and moral part of ourselves — the repository of our ethics. Finally there is the ego, which mediates between these two polarities as they invariably vie with themselves. But if Freud were in attendance at either Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda show in Alberobello in Puglia or the Alta Sartoria show in the stunning all-white city of Ostuni, also in Puglia, he would have found a spectacle that reconciled all three parts of the human personality, one that left each facet immensely satiated.
Underlying the larger-than-life, celebrity/social frenzy is an extraordinary effort to preserve native artisanal craft and to celebrate Italian culture in one of the sincerest voices in modern luxury. To me, the substance of these shows, the intellectual pursuit expressed by the beautifully hedonistic clothes, militates against a world overrun by fast, easy, lazy fashion. The imagination. The breadth. The scope. In the HBO documentary, I said of the great American designer: “His vision is the ultimate democracy, finding as much beauty in the refined upscale settings of the Ivy League as he does in the pragmatic utilitarianism of faded denim.” Similarly, the vastness of Dolce & Gabbana’s love for Italy, so profoundly expressed in their Alta Moda, Sartoria and Gioielleria shows, is all encompassing and redolent with genuineness.
