Dolce & Gabbana’s Most Outrageous Beauty Muses Include Cinderella, Sid Vicious, and More

Dolce & Gabbana’s Most Over-the-Top Beauty Muses: From Cinderella to Sophia Loren Inline

For all of the consistency of the Dolce & Gabbana woman—va-va-voom silhouettes, bolts of black eyeliner, and bodacious lengths—the inspiration behind the women designers Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce send down the runway each season is incredibly vast.

There are the femme fatales to be sure. You would be hard-pressed to find a collection on which Sophia Loren doesn’t leave her indelibly sexy mark—most notably Spring 2012 and its breezed-back updos, nude lips, and sultry cat-eyes. For Fall 2016, the term “screen siren” took on an element of whimsical fantasy in the form of modern-day Disney principesse striding forth in jewel-encrusted headbands and rosy cheeks, with one blonde model in a glittering blue midi dress striking a remarkable resemblance to Cinderella.

But off-screen icons are also given their due. The true heroine of Italian life—la mamma!—was celebrated by a parade of mothers, including a pregnant Bianca Balti, while Ashleigh Good and Eloisa Fontes walked the rose-hued runway with their babies in Fall 2015—a collection that came to fruition while meditating on images of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Monica Bellucci, and Jane Birkin with their adorable broods in tow.

Photographs of Jean Shrimpton taken by David Bailey were papered to the walls backstage at the Fall 2005 show, where Chloë Sevigny was having her hair teased into a reincarnation of the swinging London model. But, perhaps as a reminder that it’s not only women who have visual appeal worth celebrating, the rock ’n’ roll bedhead bestowed on Gisele Bündchen for her Spring 2003 asymmetrical white studded dress was inspired by none other than the Sex Pistols’s Sid Vicious.

In honor of Dolce & Gabbana's upcoming show this Milan Fashion Week, here is a look back at the storied house’s most ingenious beauty muses of all time.