Dolce Gabbana Spring/Summer 2016: All Loved Up

'Italia is Love' was the message at the Dolce Gabbana show in Milan this afternoon. The words 'love', 'famiglia', 'capri', 'domenico' and more were printed across the awning of the Italian cafe backdrop.

Over the past three decades, these two Italian designers have honed a hot, Southern Italian aesthetic to perfection. And this season it looked as good as ever. In jewelled tiaras, ceramic Sicilian lemon earrings, pointed-toed slingbacks and dangling principally Fifties-inspired bags, models stepped out in signature opera coats, trapeze-line shifts, deckchair striped sundresses... They looked as pretty as princesses.

If the silhouettes were familiar, the workmanship is increasingly ornate and, this time in particular, rainbow-coloured. Parasols, beach balls, sun loungers, daisies and poppies (the flower of the forthcoming season) were appliqued and embroidered onto garments to ever more beautiful effect.

Dolce Gabbana are by now among the great names in Italian fashion but for all their stature there is a lightness of touch not to mention unprecedented wit and warmth to their work.

At the end of the show, the designers, who have long plundered their homeland for inspiration, put every girl into an identically cut silk tunic, each stamped with the names and landmarks of the Italian cities they love.