Fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana say that their brand will die with them: “Once we’re dead, we’re dead,” said Gabbana. “I don’t want a Japanese designer to start designing Dolce & Gabbana.” Which was somewhat oddly expressed (why reach for the spectre of a “Japanese designer” in particular?). But the core point is interesting.
Fashion is odd in the way that design houses just carry on, long after the original creators are dead. Which doesn’t happen so much in other forms of creativity – say, music, literature or art. People didn’t just take over from the Beatles, Pablo Picasso or Charles Dickens. While there have been literary sequels, for instance, PD James’s Jane Austen-take Death Comes to Pemberley, these are relatively rare. In the main, brand continuum in the arts has rested on tributes and heritage.
In this way, Dolce and Gabbana come across as, at once, ultra-controlling (“You can’t use our names!”), but also radical and punk. They’re basically ensuring that not only their industry, but also their art and their potential, perish along with them.
In this era of brands being squeezed for profit harder than a Joe & the Juice orange, you don’t get much more rebellious than that.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
