Death, Seduction and Dolce&Gabbana

Daniela Culinovic
An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)
8 min readAug 30, 2021

My sexual fantasy is to cook pasta for my hard-working and well-earning man while dressed in well-fitted Dolce&Gabbana lace dress. First, he’ll eat his pasta, and then, he’ll eat…well, I leave it at that.

What defines our fashion style? How can fashion style (and body adoration) reveal something about our childhood experience, our sexual fantasies and our fears of parting with something or someone precious to us?

Source: Unsplash

Having lived in Italy for five months now, I cannot but notice the beautiful (and, often, overtly dramatic) connection the people here have with the cycles of life. There is appreciation of beauty in everything: from putting on a floral dress, a dab of perfume and bijoux when going to the supermarket to expressing love, excitement and sorrow. The honest dedication to small rituals people have here is absolutely adorable. Italian lifestyle made me explore myself with the same attention and care as Italian women pay to body adoration. Ever since I have liberated myself from the unhealthy and damaging ideas about female sexuality inculcated in me in my childhood, rediscovering my sensuality and femininity has been a fascinating journey.

I want to share a tiny revelation regarding my fashion aesthetics that was influenced by the way I learnt to relate to two forces in nature that define all life: sex and death.

Just like sex, death contains the element of discomfort and mystery: talking about it makes us vulnerable, and yet we obsess with it through a constant search for a rejuvenation formula in food, beauty products and forms of spirituality. Talking about the “spiritual awakening”, I have been recently “awakened” to the idea that death is not the end of all things. When we depart from relationships that are not compatible with where we are heading, a part of us dies. In this sense, death carries in itself a wonderful element of opportunity and fresh beginnings. There is beauty in letting people, and often painful emotions that they evoked in us, go. Once these are resolved, we can be left with memories and emotions of these people that are, actually, pleasant. And these do not have to die; they become a part of our personalities, and we can continue honoring them through whatever we do.

Sex and death have a thing in common: they are powerful natural forces that contain an opportunity for something new and fresh.

How do I see them being represented in my own fashion aesthetics?

Strong sensations, for me, have a visual, and tactile quality, and, thus, the best way I can understand them is through fashion. In other words, clothes, and different materials help me make these abstract sensations related to death and sexuality concrete and tangible.

Let me give you an example. The aesthetics of Dolce&Gabbana represents the seductive interplay of death, sex, and femininity through the lens of southern Italian patriarchy and Catholicism. I find this concept extremely enticing and entertaining: the mourning widow is, at the same time, a cunning temptress and a caring mother; death and sex incarnate.

Source: https://pin.it/DPMIPJT
Source: https://pin.it/DPMIPJT
Source: https://pin.it/4eSgIsb
Source: https://pin.it/4eSgIsb

A part of this imagery is rooted in patriarchy. La femina, the woman, that little sexy thing, is revered as a caregiver, but her true place, mind you, is at her husband’s feet. While I disagree with any form of thoughtless subjugation to any doctrine or ideology, I do appreciate a trait of traditional masculinity, which is having a sweet spot for femininity and feminine seduction (as nicely captured in Dolce&Gabbana image above).

I have been thinking a lot about patriarchy, and my attitude towards it changed as I was liberating myself of the ideas about the position of a woman in society and family, a lot of which stemmed from male-dominated family values. I always felt that I my family is a patriarchal family. For example, I have a younger brother, who has emotional and financial privileges I did not have just because I am a girl and he is a boy and he is the one who will continue the family line. Because I never stopped looking for approval from my parents, and as a child I never understood why I cannot have “the same status” as my brother, I suffered from severe sense of insufficiency, ugliness, worthlessness, self-sabotage, severe repression of sexuality and femininity and ultimately, anorexia. My drive to earn respect from a family who only appreciates males was so extreme that it almost literally killed me.

No matter what I did (including getting a PhD from UCLA and Mphil from Cambridge University) was simply not good enough just because I am not born a man and I could not “shrink” myself enough in order to fit a role of a woman as defined by a family who prioritizes men. My brother, on the other hand, got everything: the attention, the respect, a house “for free”, inheritance “for free”, a pat on a shoulder for flirting and cheating on his wife, in return for fulfilling the image of a head of a family: three children (all females, mind you), a submissive wife, and a job in the government for which daddy had to pull a few strings.

Mind you, I never wanted my brother’s life where living boils down to creating and maintaining an external image, entangled in corruption and dependency on parents. I wanted respect, and I wanted equality. I wanted to be equally valued as my brother for the things I did painstakingly on my own, and in my own way, but to no avail.

Now, is it fair to define patriarchy based on my experience? Patriarchy does not, by default, include extreme emotional unavailability from the male members of the family for the females, as was the case in my family, or, constant deprecation at an emotional and intellectual level, which was also a part of my experience. Patriarchy simply means a male-dominated society; where men decide, and women follow.

I divorced from the image of a submissive and insecure woman that I inherited from my family when I completely broke off relationship from my parents and my brother. Walking away from constantly and impossibly trying to earn my respect from those who cannot see me as a person anyways allowed for my relationship with self, including sexuality and femininity, to come to the fore.

It is only after this “death”, that I was able to explore my sexuality with curiosity and admiration. After periods of flirtation with promiscuity, I learned that the bold display of seduction comes with the element of responsibility. While it is playful and beautiful, in large degrees, it can also be manipulative and exploitive. Knowing when to stop and to say “no” when we don’t want it is equally sexy and equally elegant as seduction itself, not to mention fair towards the other person involved in it.

What would have happened to me if I did not have the strength to break off from the toxic environment of my upbringing? Here is what happens when a woman is trapped for life in an environment where she is undervalued.

I want to give homage to a woman in my family; a woman who was ridiculed and who, due to letting her surroundings define her sense of worth, in the end, gave up on herself. Well, aunt Veronique, I did not give up on you and I never will!

Source: Unsplash
Source:Unsplash

As I am writing this, my aunt Veronique is in a coma after a brain tumor surgery. She is one of the physically most beautiful women I have ever met. Flicking through the old pictures in a shoebox stored at the bottom of my grandma’s wardrobe, I cannot but think of the Hollywood green-eyed beauties of the 60ties, such as Katherine Ross. Born and raised in Croatia in 1963 to parents, one of which has southern Italian lineage, she incorporates the Mediterranean beauty along with the fragility of being the youngest (and the sickly) child among the four children. She is the one who introduced me to the world of fashion through Gioia and Chanel and who taught me respect and admiration for masterfully crafted fashion pieces. Her closet and her apartment in Abbazzia overlooking the north Adriatic bay has always had a dreamy quality for me as a little girl.

Source: Unsplash
Source: Unsplash

The smell of the freshly baked pizza that spread from her tiny, rustic kitchen, along with the paintings on the walls showing Mediterranean snippets of life, transported me to Italy and Provence.

Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=gioia+fashion+revista&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS916US916&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=Y2tAU69sbXPgJM%252CeHt3EIjXr9kpZM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kQJb8uG8LiWk5vyI1p2eC3ee-X6Gg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwishvy2tNjyAhUTPuwKHdKRBigQ9QF6BAgMEAE#imgrc=XWtixhY8yGXg9M
Source: https://www.elle.com/it/magazine/a24095523/gioia-magazine-ultimo-numero/

Always dressed up to nines even if she only went to the grocery store within a 5 min walking distance from her apartment, with her golden and silver bracelets stacked up her wrist and diamond rings that were so precious to her, as if they were her children she never had an opportunity to have, she dreamed of romance, Italy and the shores of the French riviera where she once laughed and partied at with her late and adventurous French and Italian-speaking Croatian husband. That romanticized vision of life, l’amour, the beauty and sadness of ended love affairs, the power of female seduction through body adoration and tending to her natural beauty through beauty rituals stuck with me to this day.

And as I write this, my aunt is in her hospital bed, refusing to wake up, just like a sleeping beauty. Why am I not veiled in sorrow, anticipating the dreadful possibility that I may never see her or hear about her being alive again? This is because my aunt’s dreamy lifestyle, and her personality will always been bigger than a limiting and indoctrinated fear of death as a cruel life deprivation of someone precious. Her honest appreciation of beauty in a Chanel bag, as well as in Italian cuisine, will live on. It will live on through my work in fashion and beauty, and I promise that her dreams of romance and luxury that smelled of Chanel №5, she carefully saved for special occasions only, will become reality. When I collect enough money for an iconic Chanel bag, I will dedicate it to her.

Going back to the beginning, let me summarize the ingredients of my Dolce&Gabbana inspired sexual fantasy: romanticization of life through fashion and cuisine of my aunt Veronique, and breaking away from a repressive and depreciating environment. What are the ingredients of yours?

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Daniela Culinovic
An Idea (by Ingenious Piece)

I am a linguist and an ethical/sustainable fashion and beauty advocate