The relationship between Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana is like a triad - and we're not talking about Mong Kok crime gangs, here, but metaphysics, specifically the work of Georg W. F. Hegel. The German philosopher argued that everything is the product of contradictions - take one spoonful of being (thesis), combine it with a pinch of nothingness (the antithesis) and you get becoming, the synthesis. Or, take one short, bald, muscular Sicilian who is obsessed with football, combine with one lanky Milanese aesthete who is indifferent to the game (although not the beauty of its players) and you get Dolce & Gabbana (the partners' main fashion brand), arguably the first name in Italian fashion, at least when it comes to the sexualised type, where every seam is sewn for erotic effect.
'Sex is a word; one of the three key words in life,' says Gabbana, who was born in Venice and is the northern end of the duo's polar axis.
'Everyone has a different idea about sex and tries to access it in their own way,' chimes in Dolce, D&G's south pole, although he's more of a bollard than a pole, standing a full head and a bit shorter than Gabbana, who has more to say about s-e-x.
'Ninety per cent of the world is interested in sex, not just sex but sensuality,' he says, with a lilting Italian accent that's full of seductive brio. 'I love to wear a pair of trousers that makes it look like I have a good ass. Sex is an important key for everyone.'
Dolce and Gabbana have been together as creative companions for 27 years, as business partners for 25 and, from 1985 until 2005, as lovers with one of the most closely watched romances in Europe. Throughout, sex has been their talisman. Sex with each other, sex with other people, fantasies of sex with Madonna (but only if they were suddenly to become heterosexual), allusions to sex in their advertising campaigns (some of which offended enough to be banned) and a nonstop 21/2-decade long homage to sex on the runway, whether the models have been male or female.
'When we design a dress, we try to imagine if the woman who buys it will get whistled at when she wears it. If we think she will then we are happy,' says Gabbana, sitting on a grand sofa in the salon of a 19th-century villa in the heart of Milan, where he and Dolce live (sometimes) and work.
Dolce is to the right, on another sofa, equally grand. The room is their aesthetic rendered through paintings, fabrics and knick-knacks - there are photographs and albums signed by Madonna; she always sends them one each - a portrait of a naked man by American artist Julian Schnabel, leopard prints, colourful vases and a box frame that contains the first corset bustier they ever made.
