DOLCE & GABBANA/ ANIMAL INSTINCTS MOST COSTLY

15 Year Anniversary Edition

(I apologize to those of you receiving this twice - I screwed up the audio embed the first round.)

This piece appeared in the New York Times on December 13, 2007.

THOUGH it seems impossibly abstract from the vantage point of Madison Avenue, armed conflicts are taking place between powerful aggressors and their enemies across the globe. The fighting seems unimaginable, light-years away.

Thanks for reading Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

✓

Apart from war reports and blood baths in the financial pages, we generally live in a dream-life of silky, idealized ad imagery where such realities don’t exist at all. Very little in our privileged lives recalls man’s inhumanity to man, unless it’s for the sake of entertainment, a controlled environment in which good triumphs over evil.

In Dolce & Gabbana’s latest ad campaign, an unfeeling model in white sunglasses holds the leash of a large cheetah as it mauls another model, pinned to the dirt under a dead tree and a hell-red sky.

Despots have always been synonymous with black satin sheets, golden plumbing and rock-star sunglasses. Dolce & Gabbana seems to have fully surrendered to the dictator-beast within, with all the carnivorous perversion, sadistic social Darwinism and animal-print safari-wear this implies.

The brand’s newly reopened shop is obsidian black, high-tech and shiny as a three-story iPhone, with black chandeliers the size of speedboats.

I adore Dolce & Gabbana. It is right on code for my weak and confused cultural identity: I yearn to dress with the authority of a kleptocratic cannibal.

Sitting among suitcase-size handbags made from giant robot snakes was a crocodile bag the same size, shape and color of a human torso. This seemed to be deliberately marketed toward women who prefer their husbands disassembled, and in the overhead compartment ($49,000!). If you’re transporting smaller limbs, $750,000 in small bills or raw uranium, there is a $29,000 doctor’s-bag version, in the dark plum of sacrificial ox entrails.

I found the black striped silk cardigan I had only seen in dreams, and cursed a jealous God for making it $1,095.

The second-floor shoe section is wrapped around an S-shaped sectional couch in black velvet. Dolce & Gabbana shoes look sensational — exotic, cruel little weapons. Sadly, they can be hit or miss in terms of adhering to a human foot. I went straight for pointy crocodile pumps, dyed arterial red ($1,825). I was salivating with a desire to feel their blood on the dance floor. Agony!

I was ready to commit $695 to pumps with chrome toes and heel shafts. For any girl who has lived among Belgian cobblestones, these shoes represent $35 a month in heel repair that could go straight to the dermatology slush fund. But the curse was upon them: they had apparently been molded on the Queen of Sheba’s goat hoof, or perhaps a ball-and-claw table leg.

At the top of the third-floor escalator, an excruciatingly handsome Alain Delon type offered me a flute of Veuve, or a Grey Goose cocktail. That’s it, I thought. This is my promised land. Hold my animal, I’m staging a putsch.

Drooling over racks of totalitarian resort finery, I succumbed to delusions of megalomania. I selected noms de guerre and despotic monikers for each outfit: Madame Subcommandantrix. La Cobra Blanca. She Who Leaves a Flaming Trail of Plastic Animal-Print Combat Garments en Route to the Glorious People’s Jacuzzi.

Or simply ... Cher.

An example of superlative service: You have selected over $30,000 of garments  and there are three of them, total. They are carried into the “special” dressing room (the one with — no lie —what I believed to be actual cheetah fur covering the doors). You remark: “I’ll be in here for a while. I am going to do a pile of blow and clean my gun.”

The sterling professional, instead of dialing security, quips that you’ll be “needing another drink.”

This is how it feels to hold a nation in fear!

The black sequined flapper dress will be given to me in the Harlem of heaven: a jeweled grosgrain belt, heartbreaking drape and swish. It was “special”  i.e., one of a kind; i.e., $10,995. I wept.

The real coup: A silver lamé pantsuit with cigarette legs and black magic. It had eaten young Elvis and absorbed his power. I pictured myself on an all-chrome Jet Ski, catching air over a strobe-lit ocean of mercury. With a Vegas horn section.

“Shall I call the fitter?” the sterling professional asked. That suit ($3,850) wasn’t to come off until M.P.’s pried my corpse out of it. Oh, for a tyranny of one’s own. I vowed to return with euros after selling black helicopters to Libya, and my mother, too.

The men’s department is not for Hemingway types who shoot their own meat. Dolce seems to be haberdashing toward the ethically askew: gilded Mafiosi, preening hedge funders, thugonomists, wannabe plutocrats. These men wear buttercup-yellow lambskin motocross jackets and laser-cut wingtip pimp booties.

I asked about a lacquered linen suit in high-gloss pewter ($2,100).

“Well,” said the salesman, with evident distaste, “I suppose you could wear it in Miami.”

One white disco suit with black lapels was pure “Scarface”: something Suge Knight might wear to a midnight showing of the sing-it-yourself “Saturday Night Fever.”

I’m not saying Dolce & Gabbana celebrates brutality, but they do make me think that all my wardrobe really needs is a gold-plated Kalashnikov, an entourage of boy soldiers and a necklace of human teeth. They pour gasoline on life’s more incendiary fantasies by tempting you to submit to your moral incompetence: to indulge your most terrible defense mechanisms, to abuse power.

L’état, c’est moi, baby.

Life, she is dirty and cheap, but not my handbag. Bring me the head of St. John Sport. I am the Lizard Queen.

Dolce & Gabbana

825 Madison Avenue (69th Street); (212) 249-4100

VENI Come to D & G’s just reopened Upper East Side empire for unnatural resources well worth looting.

VIDI See the Central Casting gods working in mysterious customers: Are they Cuban drug lords? Slave traders? Wives of Adnan Khashoggi? Well, they certainly look like them.

VICI Conquer the last of your virtue, submit to buying $80,000 worth of mink handbags and crocodile boots, and charge it to the taxpayers by any means necessary.

CintraW@gmail.com

Artwork: “Flamenco,” oil on linen by Cintra Wilson 2022