Trulli, Madly, Deeply: A Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda Show Celebrating the Native Crafts of Puglia

On the first night of Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda festivities in Puglia, in the heel of the boot of Italy, Dame Helen Mirren was talking up the native flora. The actress and local resident pointed out that some of the region’s olive trees are as old as—or even older—than Rome’s Colosseum. The famous Roman structure has a couple of millennia on Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s business, but at 40 this year, their brand is its own kind of Italian institution: colorful, proud, and rooted in family and tradition, but also quite alive in the popular imagination.

A few months after last summer’s 10-year anniversary Alta Moda festivities in Sicily, season two of The White Lotus took place there. In the first episode, its star Jennifer Coolidge steps off the boat giving main character energy in a Dolce & Gabbana hourglass floral sheath. She never finds her dolce vita, but that hasn’t stopped tourists from descending on the place in search of some seaside glamour of their own. If you can’t book a hotel room on the island this summer, the designers are at least part of the reason why.

This year, though, they set out to tell a different kind of Italian story. There’s no way to call a five-day event in which ultra-high net worth clients from around the world party together and vie against each other for five- and six-figure dresses a humble affair, but like other designers in this moment of global chaos and uncertainty, Dolce and Gabbana feel drawn to symbols of realness.

That’s why a crowd that included Venus Williams, Christian Bale, Erling Haaland, Kim and Kris Kardashian, and 500-or-so other guests found themselves in Puglia, which in addition to nurturing the world’s oldest olive trees is known as one of Italy’s two breadbaskets. (The country loves its bread too much to have just one.) That’s why the Alta Moda show was set in Alberobello, a Unesco World Heritage Site with hundreds of cone-roofed stone buildings dating to the 14th century—they’re called trulli—so picturesque it looks like a movie set. And that’s why its local craftspeople were posted on the narrow streets hand-making orecchiette, weaving straw baskets, working leather into bridles, and even carving children’s toys out of cactus leaves.