Dolce & Gabbana Autumn/Winter 2012

These clothes, though, were rarely entirely virginial. For whilst touches like the marzipan-perfect pastel roses, the spinster’s needlepoint and some occasionally meringue-massive tiers of white lace were nods to a classically Catholic restraint, this was fashion for sinning in. “Oh yes,” said Gabbana, “always sexy”.Dame Helen had said before the show that she had come to the Dolce & Gabbana front row (where she sat next to Monica Bellucci) because she so enjoys wearing – rather than necessarily looking at – the clothes. “The weird thing is they fit me,” she said. “Usually when you put on ‘fashion’ clothes, they’re too small and they don’t go in and out – and I go in and out.” Afterwards, however, she had become just an avid a spectator of fashion as her fellow audience. “What these people here do, they spend so many hours sewing and you could see it. To me, that is the absolute pleasure of fashion: just looking at a beautifully made thing is so wonderful.”