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Madonna Makes Veiled Entrance to Dolce&Gabbana for Show Celebrating Her 1990s Heyday

US singer Madonna stands at the end of the Dolce and Gabbana fashion show during the Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2025, in Milan, Italy, 21 September 2024. EPA/MATTEO BAZZI
US singer Madonna stands at the end of the Dolce and Gabbana fashion show during the Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2025, in Milan, Italy, 21 September 2024. EPA/MATTEO BAZZI
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Madonna Makes Veiled Entrance to Dolce&Gabbana for Show Celebrating Her 1990s Heyday

US singer Madonna stands at the end of the Dolce and Gabbana fashion show during the Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2025, in Milan, Italy, 21 September 2024. EPA/MATTEO BAZZI
US singer Madonna stands at the end of the Dolce and Gabbana fashion show during the Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2025, in Milan, Italy, 21 September 2024. EPA/MATTEO BAZZI

Celebrities swarmed Milan Fashion Week on the last big day of runway shows on Saturday, sending crowds of adoring fans from venue to venue.
Madonna sat in a front-row seat at Dolce & Gabbana, along with Naomi Campbell and Victoria De Angelis of Maneskin. Her bandmate, Maneskin frontman Damiano David, showed up at Diesel, one of the season's hottest tickets, across town. Jacob Elordi took a seat on a bunny-shaped bean bag chair to take in the Bottega Veneta show.
Highlights from Milan Fashion Week's mostly womenswear previews for next spring and summer on Saturday, The Associated Press said.
Dolce & Gabbana Celebrate Madonna
Madonna attempted a semi-stealth entrance to the Dolce & Gabbana runway show draped in a black veil for a runway show referencing her 1990s heyday and celebrating the cone bra.
Models in bleach-blonde wigs strutted in Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s signature corsets and fitted jackets, each featuring the aggressively feminine cone bra, in a collection that notes said “pays homage to an ironic and powerful female figure.”
Madonna wasn't cited specifically, but the stars of the Milan designers and pop star have been aligned ever since they made costumes for her 1993 Girlie Show tour. The tour promoted Madonna's “Erotica” album launched alongside her taboo-breaking coffee table book, “Sex.”
“Madonna has always been our icon. It’s thanks to her that a lot of things in our lives changed,'' the designers said in a note.
The collection, dubbed “Italian Beauty,” perfectly captured that moment in time. Cone bras peeked out of cropped jackets with a pencil skirt, garters swung from corsets and coats sculpted the body. Floral prints returned, accenting a color scheme of black, nude, red and white. Oversized cross earrings finished the looks. Heels were unapologetically high.
After taking their bows, the designers walked down the runway to greet their guest of honor. Madonna, still covered by the Chantilly long lace veil fastened by a gold and crystal crown, stood to embrace them both.
Bottega Veneta taps wonder Bottega Veneta's sometimes misproptioned, sometimes crinkled, always provocative collection explores the intersection between the real world and fantasy, adulthood and childhood. Creative director Matthieu Blazy's meaning is simple: To delight.
“We need beauty. We need joy,'' Blazy said backstage. ”We need that experimental act. It is also an act of freedom.”
In this universe, a dental clinic receptionist wears a skirt with a trouser on just one leg, which Blazy asserts as a playful act. In a familiar scene, a well-dressed father carries his daughter's pink and purple school bag. “Do we like the bag? I don’t know. Does it tell a story? Yes,'' Blazy said.
Each detail is deliberate, from a flat collar on a dress shaped like bunny ears to big colorful raffia wigs, even if their ultimate purpose is just for fun. Crinkled clothes signify a child's attempt to dress up, only to be ruined by the end of the day.
Blazy's characters carried what appeared to be ordinary plastic grocery bags, but which were made out of nylon and leather — part of the brand's ongoing technological innovations. The faux plastic bags signified everyday life, and were accompanied by brand’s trademark woven bags, one for a violin, another a wine bottle.
Ferragamo’s freedom of movement Ferragamo creative director Maximilian Davis celebrated the freedom of movement inherent in ballet in his new collection, inspired by archival photos of brand founder Salvatore Ferragamo fitting African American ballet dancer Katherine Dunham for shoes.
Dunham often trained and worked in the Caribbean, which allowed the British designer’s with Jamaican roots “to find a link between Ferragamo’s Italian-ness and my heritage.”
The collection recalls a 1980s way of dressing, with strong shoulders and oversized tailoring, also an homage to Russian ballet star Rudolf Nuryev, another historic Ferragamo customer.
To emphasize movement, Davis created long parachute dresses in silk nylon, suede and organza with a billowing bubble shape. The ballet dancer is honored in cashmere dancer wraps color-blocked with layered leotards. More subversively, shorts with frayed denim suggested a tutu.
Diesel elevates denim Diesel models tramped a field of 14,800 kilograms (nearly 33,000 pounds) of denim scraps “to highlight the beauty of waste, creating a dystopian backdrop for the brand’s latest collection of elevated denim.
The Veneto-based brand under creative director Glenn Martens has become a laboratory for textile experimentation. Short-shorts are embroidered with a cascade of extra-long fringe, for a skirt-like effect. Jeans are lasered to look destroyed; necklines on cotton sweatshirts look distressed but the effect is actually a jacquard with the cotton burned away to the tulle.
Marten's said the brand's “disruption” goes beyond its design. "We are pushing for circularity in our production,'' he said. In that vein: A coat was made from leftover spools of denim thread, while oversized jeans were from recycled cotton, some from Diesel's own production. And the scraps piled on the floor were to be repurposed after the show.

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Fashion

Fashion Suppliers Want Brands to Help With EU Green Regulations

An employee arranges bobbins at a textile plant in Haian county, Jiangsu province, China. REUTERS
An employee arranges bobbins at a textile plant in Haian county, Jiangsu province, China. REUTERS
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Fashion Suppliers Want Brands to Help With EU Green Regulations

An employee arranges bobbins at a textile plant in Haian county, Jiangsu province, China. REUTERS
An employee arranges bobbins at a textile plant in Haian county, Jiangsu province, China. REUTERS

As the global fashion industry braces for new green supply-chain regulations, clothing makers in low-income countries like Bangladesh expect major international brands to share the burden. The European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), adopted in July, requires corporations to make their global value chains more sustainable.
The new rules on workers’ rights and emissions could transform the way clothing is made and sold, most significantly in the garment factories and textile mills across Asia that account for much of the sector’s pollution. Bangladesh, the world’s second-biggest clothing exporter after China, in particular needs assistance from major brands as it undergoes a political transition following mass protests sparked by a jobs crisis that ousted the previous government.
"While in Bangladesh we have prepared our mindset and ecosystem for the change, we will need support from our global buyers, as well as our government, to reach the green transition goals," said Abdullah Hil Rakib, managing director at Team Group, a clothing supplier in Bangladesh that employs about 23,000 people. The CSDDD seeks to bring corporate practices in line with the Paris Agreement on climate goals. Major European brands must ensure their suppliers are conducting due diligence to protect workers and communities from the adverse effects of their operations or pay compensation for damages.
For the fashion industry, the onus will mostly fall on factories in places like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Cambodia to find and fill the gaps in safeguarding labor, human rights and the environment, experts said.
International brands must collaborate with these suppliers to adhere to the new rules, according to a study by clothing makers in Asia that was supported by the Transformers Foundation, which represents the denim industry, and GIZ FABRIC, a project from German development agency GIZ to support sustainable textile production in the region.
GROWING COMPLEXITY
The new regulations may provide a chance for suppliers to push for ethical commercial practices and more favorable contracts from international brands, representatives from companies behind the study told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a joint interview.
But manufacturers are still coming to grips with what measures they must take and how they will finance their portion of the estimated $1 trillion investment required for the fashion industry to transition to net-zero emissions in the coming decades.
Rakib estimated that suppliers will have to make additional investments of 20% to 30% to turn their factories green.
Industry experts warned that the CSDDD will require a raft of legal changes in countries where the products are manufactured.
National legislatures will have to pass laws that line up with the EU directive. Brands must devise their approach to implementing such laws, and courts will need precedents in order to enforce them, said Matin Saad Abdullah, a professor of computer science and engineering at BRAC University in Dhaka who maps garment factories’ compliance on labor rights and environmental standards.
"The path forward is long and complex," he said.
Brands and suppliers have widely differing capacities and plans for meeting what the EU calls “just transition,” said Zahangir Alam, a fashion industry consultant who has worked for three decades with top global brands on labor issues and sustainability.
For example, Sweden’s H&M Group aims to cut carbon emissions by 56% by 2030, while US retailer Walmart’s Project Gigaton seeks to avoid 1 billion metric tons of emissions in its global value chain by 2030.
Smaller producers in particular will struggle to determine which actions they need to take to meet a brand’s particular benchmarks, Alam said.
‘SHARED RESPONSIBILITY’
Industry associations and government agencies can encourage a common approach by companies in the transition to cleaner and fairer practices, said Rakib.
Bangladesh's garment makers' association, called BGMEA, has set up the Responsible Business Hub to provide information to suppliers about the changing regulatory landscape. The group is also creating a platform to facilitate data collection and sharing. But suppliers said they need brands at their side too and that meeting the CSDDD’s requirements is a “shared responsibility,” as the directive mandates.
Brands are often accused of passing the buck to their suppliers when it comes to ensuring a living wage or investing in decarbonization.
To achieve net-zero emission by 2050, the fashion industry will have to invest more than $600 billion to implement solutions that already exist and about $400 billion to develop innovations, according to a report by the Apparel Impact Institute (Aii), a non-profit promoting sustainable investments.
Aii has formed the Fashion Climate Fund, which pools resources from brands and philanthropies, and is working with more than 1,000 suppliers to help them achieve energy and water efficiency, said Lewis Perkins, President of Aii.
Aii acts as a "clearing house" to identify programs and technology for decarbonization and encourage local suppliers to adopt them.
"We have identified 1,500 suppliers with high energy usage and aim to support locally grown decarbonization solutions, when they meet our criteria, prioritized by the suppliers themselves, with buy-in from multiple stakeholders, so that all actors are on the same page," Perkins said.
WORKERS’ VOICES
The EU directive is also aimed at improving labor conditions, requiring businesses to verify workplace safety and allow workers and unions to file complaints about human rights violations with authorities.
Union leaders said they are waiting to see how the changes are put in place to protect workers.
"When the laws kick in, we need clear and simple channels to seek remedy when anything goes wrong - and the Global North should have a roadmap for supporting the upskilling of workers," said Kalpona Akter, executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Workers Solidarity (BCWS).
"Moreover, for all the lawmakers' focus on transitioning to net zero, there should be a comparable commitment on helping workers deal with climate impacts like flooding and heat," said Akter.
Garment-producing countries like Bangladesh could lose $66 billion in export revenues by 2030 due to flooding and heat waves, said reports by the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University in the United States and investment manager Schroders published last year.
Team Group’s Rakib said Bangladesh’s experience making changes to improve conditions for workers and the environment make it well-positioned to tackle the new rules – and ensure it retains its position as a leading producer of the world’s clothing.
"With the strides that suppliers in Bangladesh have made in ensuring workers are safe from fire and electrical risks - and more than 200 green factories making extra savings on energy and water - we will remain a key sourcing choice," Rakib said.