Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

I’d love to buy Dolce and Gabbana just to spite Elton John

Thank God for Dolce and Gabbana. Where other fashion designers play with their image like Mr Benn, the children’s character who adopts a different persona every time he changes his hat, they have a remarkably consistent – for fashion – way of looking at the world. It’s about family, the kind of families they had, of the Italian/Sicilian Catholic variety. So, their beautiful – and I mean really beautiful, not just freaky, unlike some – models are placed in the context of grannies, grandads, picturesque peasants and children – occasionally in first communion outfits. Their last show, which the fashion press loved, brought the house down at the end, when the models came on the catwalk holding or leading their adorable children. It was, I suppose, babies as accessories, but another way of looking at it was a celebration of motherhood. Which honestly, fashion doesn’t often do.

But there’s been a giant, collective hissy intake of breathe in the reaction to their interview with the Italian Panorama magazine, in which they express their objection to same sex marriage and IVF parenthood.

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