Taormina is not just a place. It is a threshold – a boundary that both divides and unites myth and modernity, nature and performance. In this suspended frontier of the Mediterranean, Dolce&Gabbana and Mytheresa have given form to a contemporary rite: a gesture that passes through fashion without being confined by it, an aesthetic invocation that becomes a choreography of the South.
At the heart of this narrative stands the San Domenico Palace. More than a hotel, it is a mythical entity. A former 14th-century convent, now a sanctuary of sublime beauty, it has welcomed the likes of Oscar Wilde, Greta Garbo, D.H. Lawrence, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, and Audrey Hepburn. Here, centuries of desire, literature, cinema, and history converge. Still echoing through its walls is the dreamlike and unsettling atmosphere of The White Lotus’s second season.
Its selection is no coincidence. San Domenico is not merely a backdrop — it is substance. A physical and spiritual extension of the Dolce&Gabbana universe: layered, sensual, baroque, and timelessly suspended. The cloister’s stones, blooming gardens, and terraces facing a classically eternal sea are not scenery but narrative matter — alive and regenerative.
Who wears the South today? And more crucially: how does one inhabit an imaginary so thoroughly explored? Dolce&Gabbana answers not with nostalgia, but with transfiguration. The ceramics of Caltagirone, the silks of Palermo, the flowers, gold, Madonnas, domes, prickly pears, deep blues, and volcanic reds are transformed into a new sensory vocabulary. No longer citation — but reincarnation.
This is not folklore. It is aesthetic memory. A memory that becomes garment, fabric, body. Barthes wrote, “clothing is never innocent” — and here, every thread signifies belonging, every motif roots itself in the soul of a land. A South that becomes shape, speech, structure.
The encounter with Mytheresa — not simply a digital storefront, but a transnational cultural platform — magnifies this vision. It gives it movement, renders it fluid, and carries it into the realm of global simultaneity. A South that spreads, shares, and reshapes itself across borders.
In an era when identities fragment and reassemble in real time, Dolce&Gabbana charts the Mediterranean like a cartographer of myth. They reimagine it as an affective map — where aesthetics serve as both resistance and desire.
This gesture holds power because it is liturgical without being rhetorical, ritualistic without repetition. It returns us to the sacred within the everyday — to a beauty that accumulates and reinvents itself. It proves one can still speak of place, land, and origin without resorting to postcard clichés.
We are living in the age of post-tradition, where the future carries the scent of the past, yet takes on an entirely new form. Because, as Pasolini wrote, “tradition is continuous innovation” — and this reimagined South is its vibrant testament.
