I had used some of their clothes in the work I was showing at an exhibition in London, and they had bought some of those paintings. Then, after the first Alta Moda show, they mentioned that maybe I could paint something from it—whatever I felt inspired by. It was all very organic—from the love of art that Domenico has, and the love of fashion that I have. The beauty of it was that I was given total carte blanche to do whatever I wanted. I selected dresses from the show, and they shipped them to my studio in New York. I’d either put the dress on a mannequin, or I would put them on myself—which always made me nervous, because I use oil paint, and it would be impossible to get it off!
By that time, I had a new studio in the Village—the parlor floor of a house where Mark Twain once lived. Domenico visited, and I showed him the work, and he got really excited: “Do more,” he said—”bigger, more, bigger, more, more, more!” The wonderful thing about them both is their enthusiasm: The sky’s the limit, and I was free to fly.
So much these days is like Instagram: Everything is about instant, immediate gratification. I have 24 paintings which I have been holding on to for such a long time, and it has been a wonderful experience to live with them, grow with them. They will be in their exhibition in Milan, in the first room you enter. All of the work will be in gold frames—it’s a very Italian Renaissance type of thing—and there will be some Alta Moda clothes in the middle of the room, to emphasize that relationship between art and fashion: how one inspires the other, and also the idea that the show is about the beauty of making things by hand, fatto a mano. I’m so proud to have my work in the show. It’s a beautiful story that started with me meeting them, being inspired by them, and in turn them being inspired by me. None of us knew where it would all end up.
Isabella Rossellini, Actress and Model
I met Stefano and Domenico when I was a model—I think it was for their second advertising campaign, which was this series of beautiful photographs by Steven Meisel. I had heard of these wonderful designers, and I had seen a few of the clothes that they’d done, and it was very clear to me that their inspiration was Italy—but it was the Italy that we Italians were ashamed of [laughs]: The widows, the women dressed in the black, the perceptions of Sicilian culture. And when I saw their fashion, of course there was a lot of irony, but also they glamorized what we didn’t see as glamorous. (Quite the opposite, in fact.) It was important, then, that when we shot those pictures that there was a strong sense of what we call Italianata—the Italian DNA.