Erling Haaland’s new kit: Dolce & Gabbana velvet - The Times
What a difference a year — and a World Cup — makes. In the summer of 2025, Dolce & Gabbana staged its Alta Sartoria men’s couture show in Rome. Alta Sartoria is the pinnacle of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s world, where one-off outfits are created to demonstrate the duo’s commitment to handmade craftsmanship, and the presentations always take place in a storied Italian location. On the Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge over the Tiber decorated with ten angels designed by Bernini, the collection was paraded in front of top clients and a handful of press, plus the requisite sprinkling of celebrities.
Among these attendees was one Erling Braut Haaland, the Norwegian striker, who that night garnered little special attention despite his imposing 6ft 4in presence and distinctive outfit of a pale grey poloneck and flowing trousers.
However, at this year’s show — an extravaganza held in the ancient ruins of the Teatro Antico in Taormina, Sicily — when the same young Norwegian arrived, a palpable frisson ran through the audience. Of all the celebrities in attendance, this was the man people were most excited to see.
It was only three days after Norway had lost to England in Miami and exited the World Cup, and now Haaland was taking his seat on the front row wearing a double-breasted ivory silk suit, black sunglasses and blue leather loafers. He doesn’t appear in Dolce & Gabbana ad campaigns and is not the face of one of the label’s fragrances, but he has been a fan of the designers for years and is regularly invited to their shows.
Dolce & Gabbana has long championed footballers, even publishing a book of photographs, Calcio, in 2003, full of images of Serie A players wearing the brand’s signature Sicily-inspired menswear. However, it must be said that Haaland does not conform to the image of your typical Dolce & Gabbana male, who tends to be a more regular-sized Italian stallion than giant Viking. And for this reason he is somehow perfect in the context of the Alta Sartoria story — the couture offer for men that demonstrates how the Italian-infused aesthetic of the house can be imaginatively expanded to create outfits for any individual.
Whereas in Rome last year we had a parade of performers dressed as cardinals before the arrival of models wearing ecclesiastically inspired outfits, this year the look was resolutely southern Italian, nodding to different ranks in Sicilian society. The evening began with a scene of village life. Men in dark brown corduroy suits or waistcoats teamed with white shirts and flat caps sat at rustic tables with women in black dresses and lace.
In keeping with the trademark theatricality of Dolce & Gabbana Alta Sartoria presentations, the soundtrack was opera — specifically Pietro Mascagni’s 19th-century work Cavalleria rusticana, which is set on Easter Sunday in a village in Sicily. After the scene-setting, the new models started to process, dressed in elaborately embroidered outfits, often created in velvet. These looks — an ivory belted smoking jacket, white and black lace shirts, gold embroidered jackets with matching gold riding boots, voluminous capes, long jackets like frock coats, pretty much all in a palette of black, white and gold and adorned with golden jewellery — bore the hallmarks of a historical nobleman’s wardrobe.
Domenico Dolce grew up in the hill town of Polizzi Generosa, about 70 miles west of Taormina. “When I was a young child I liked to play in my father’s tailoring atelier,” he says. “He would dress all sorts of different people — from the townspeople that would come to him for appointments to the great families we visited in their big houses. That was when he would be asked to create things that were more special, using luxurious fabrics like velvet.” He talks about how, in addition to this, his idea of menswear was forged by observing life in the town square every evening on his way home, where he would see the young bucks of the Sixties wearing sharp suits, drinking martinis at café tables and driving around in Alfa Romeos and Lancias.
Once you put these elements together and feed them through a contemporary lens, you get today’s Dolce & Gabbana, a celebration of a kind of Italianate style that is far from the more serious tailored garb of the country’s industrial north. Indeed, the resulting collections are much more aligned with the traditions of the rural south: smart black suits for church on Sunday, decorative dressing-up for parties echoing the sartorial elegance one might have seen at a 19th-century ball, the use of corduroy and velvet and pinstripes. A fusion of sun, sea, superstition and drama, where the colourful landscape with its abundant fruits reveals dark, mysterious palazzos full of historic tapestries and frescoes.
Stefano Gabbana talks of the allure of Sicily: “Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Byzantines — all have helped shape an idea of this island that continues to inspire the world today. Sicily does not merely preserve its history. It continues to create it. Because Sicily is not only an island. It is an idea. It is the place where the sacred meets the profane.” And as if to underline this, the super-luxurious Alta Sartoria show ended not only with a reprise of the outfits, with all the models coming out together in a rapid stream as is the convention at the conclusion of a fashion show, but also with the “townsfolk” of the evening partaking in a Sicilian “funeral procession” in front of the ancient Greek pillars of the amphitheatre after the sun had set over the Ionian Sea in the distance.
There is of course a commercial rationale for this sort of fashion spectacle. While the outfits on display cost tens of thousands and are shown explicitly to a small cohort of wealthy customers likely to purchase, the traditional craftsmanship involved in the production of the pieces is regarded by Dolce & Gabbana as a critical part of its narrative. The tailored suit, jacket or coat that you might buy off the peg in store benefits from the halo effect of Alta Sartoria. There is also a Dolce & Gabbana made-to-measure service for men that allows the more everyday customer to customise pieces to their own specifications, to create something that will be uniquely theirs without involving the time and expense required for full couture.
The reasoning goes: even if purchasing the brand’s ready-to-wear, the Dolce & Gabbana wearer knows he is tapping into a practice of craftsmanship that the duo are committed to upholding. He is also, of course, benefiting from the very particular aesthetic mix forged by young Dolce’s childhood.
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