For Spring/Summer 2027, Dolce&Gabbana returned to the Sicilian family palazzo, the kind of house where clothes and objects are passed down rather than thrown away. Here, identity is never fixed: it is shaped by what came before, reworked in the present and carried into what comes next. By disrupting the codes of its own Sicilian heritage, the house introduced a new character into the Dolce&Gabbana family, one shaped by inheritance, instinct and individuality.

The collection, titled Stravaganza Siciliana, looks to the baroque interiors of these palazzi, where clothes, jewels, textiles and objects are kept, handed down and reworked so they can be passed on again. A grandmother’s jacket, an aunt’s brooch, a trousseau, embroidered linen, lace and old upholstery all carry traces of lives already lived. Here, those fragments are pieced back together through a present-day eye into something eclectic, eccentric and entirely singular. The guiding line comes from Lampedusa’s The Leopard: for everything to remain as it is, everything must change.

In practice, the interiors of the house moved onto the body. Damask, passementerie and furnishing fabrics—the materials of sofas and curtains—were cut into dresses and jackets, effectively turning the palazzo into the wardrobe. Pastel lace sat alongside leopard print, brocade and upholstery worked their way into tailoring, lingerie emerged beneath precise jackets, and miniskirts pushed against decorum. Nothing was sorted by era, material or formality; the collision was deliberate. With stravaganza rooted in performance, spectacle and festival, dressing itself became something of a staged event. Every inherited reference was brought into the present with joyful abandon.

Jewelry was piled on rather than carefully selected. Pearls, crosses, cameos, coral, brooches, stones and talismans accumulated across the body, as though pulled from several relatives’ jewelry boxes at once. Chandeliers and heirlooms became sources of light, their glitter carried into the jewelry and accessories. A black crocheted flower brooch, its layered petals gathered around a cluster of crystals, captured the idea on a smaller scale: an object that appeared inherited, but was made new.

Leopard was one of the collection’s core motifs, its meaning shifting across centuries of Sicilian history. It appears in the Roman mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale at Piazza Armerina, where it belonged to an imagery of power, attraction and spectacle. Centuries later, it took on a distinctly Sicilian resonance through Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo. Dolce&Gabbana brought it forward once again, recasting the motif through sensuality, irony and excess. The house has always drawn on Sicily, but this season it treated that inheritance with less reverence: the references were passed down, pulled apart and worn without ceremony.

Courtesy of Dolce&Gabbana