Dolce & Gabbana

Founded 1985 · Milan, Italy · Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana

Dolce & Gabbana built a whole aesthetic on southern Italy — Sicilian mourning, lace, tailoring — and its perfumery follows with the same clarity. Light Blue is one of the few perfumes people identify with a specific place: the Mediterranean in summer.

History

Domenico Dolce, a Sicilian and a tailor's son, and Stefano Gabbana, a Milanese, showed their first collection in Milan in 1985. The house grew large in the nineties on an image mixing Italian neorealism with the corset, and with Madonna as its visible client. Perfumery arrived in 1992 and struck in 2001 with Light Blue, a citrus of apple and cedar still selling twenty years later. The One line, from 2006, and King, from 2019, carry the masculine side.

Iconic models

Light Blue (2001)
Sicilian lemon, green apple and cedar. The perfume that fixed the idea of a "Mediterranean summer" in the category.
The One (2006)
A spiced amber, the house's big card in both masculine and feminine.
K by Dolce & Gabbana (2019)
A spiced citrus with a big opening, the most recent of its successes.

Worth knowing

Light Blue has been on the best-seller lists for more than twenty years without reformulations that change its face — very rare in a category where a hit has a half-life of five years.