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Over the last 30 years, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have dressed Madonna, designed costumes for Baz Luhrmann movies and fended off one of the most convoluted tax evasion cases in recent business history.
Well before same-sex marriage became widely recognized around the world (though not in Italy), the two were openly living together as lovers, unapologetic as they showed up in their tight white T-shirts at gay clubs like the Sound Factory. A recent ad campaign for their fashion line, Dolce & Gabbana, seemed to extol group sex.
So it was something of a surprise this week when word broke that the two men, who are no longer romantically involved but still run their business together, had given an interview in the Italian magazine Panorama in which they said they opposed gay people having families of their own.
“You are born to a mother and a father, or at least that’s how it should be,” Mr. Dolce said. “I call children of chemistry, synthetic children. Rented uterus, semen chosen from a catalog.”
Outrage was swift.
Elton John, who has two children via in-vitro fertilization with his husband, David Furnish, called for a boycott of Dolce & Gabbana, a brand he has long worn. Courtney Love declared her intention to burn all the D&G clothing she owned. The director Ryan Murphy tweeted that Dolce & Gabbana’s clothes are “as ugly as their hate.”
Andy Cohen, the host of “Watch What Happens: Live,” said earlier this week that he was auctioning his black Dolce suit on eBay and would donate the money to the Family Equality Council, a gay rights organization. “Even though I loved this suit,” he said in the listing, “it wouldn’t be any fun for me to wear it again.” (By Wednesday afternoon, bidding had reached $1,850.)
It was the second time in the last year that members of the fashion and entertainment communities have called for the boycott of a global brand over gay rights issues, the other involving the Dorchester hotels owned by the sultan of Brunei, among them the Beverly Hills Hotel, Le Meurice in Paris and the Principe di Savoia in Milan. Brunei is implementing laws allowing harsh punishment for gay sex and adultery.
The difference this time, in what seems like a tacit acknowledgment of the power a major advertiser wields in the publishing world: no editor of a fashion magazine contacted for this article would agree to comment or even be interviewed about the proposed boycott, not even Anna Wintour of Vogue, who took a very public stance over the Brunei issue, banning Vogue staff members from staying at those hotels and actively encouraging other Condé Nast executives to do the same.
This time, along with Ms. Wintour, Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour, and Roberta Myers, the editor of Elle, declined to comment, as did the openly gay (and recently married) Ariel Foxman, InStyle’s editor.
Even Joanna Coles, the normally loquacious editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, was silent Wednesday. (Testy relations with the news media are nothing new for Dolce & Gabbana. The designers have banned the fashion critics for The New York Times from their Milan runway shows since 2007, when they were angered by a review of their collections that year.)
And while Madonna declined to comment, associates of the singer seemed to be making subtle attempts this week to distance her from the designers, noting that her relationship with Mr. Dolce and Mr. Gabbana has been contentious over the years. The message: Lots of people have issues with them.
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For their part, Mr. Dolce and Mr. Gabbana issued an apology, of sorts, that did little to mollify their critics.
“We firmly believe in democracy and the fundamental principle of freedom of expression that upholds it,” Mr. Dolce said in a statement delivered by his spokesman, Paolo Cigognini, who declined further comment. “We talked about our way of seeing reality, but it was never our intention to judge other people’s choices.”
(On his Instagram page, Mr. Gabbana called Elton John a “fascist” and posted images of a Je Suis Charlie-style campaign, titled appropriately “Je Suis D&G.”)
Italian fashion is largely a dynastic industry, but unlike Miuccia Prada, Donatella Versace or Angela Missoni, Mr. Dolce and Mr. Gabbana, who met in the early 1980s, do not come from money.
Mr. Dolce grew up in Sicily. His father, according to a 2005 New Yorker profile, was a tailor and his mother sold fabric and clothing at a local emporium.
Mr. Gabbana is taller, flashier, perennially tan and rides around Milan, his hometown, on a leopard-print motorino. His father worked in a printing factory and his mother worked for a laundry service.
The two began their business in 1985 and by the early 1990s, Madonna was wearing their clothes everywhere. She was the ideal spokeswoman for the two designers, who both rebelled against Roman Catholicism and yet revered its iconography.
And like her, Dolce & Gabbana promulgated an image of excess but in real life were workhorses.
“You’d go into the stores and see all the studs and the bells and whistles in the front, but in the back there were surprisingly wearable clothes,” said the writer William Norwich, who worked for Vogue in the early 1990s.
The clothing business in the United States never became enormous, but by 2005, their company employed about 2,000 people.
They started a fragrance business, Mr. Gabbana appeared on reality shows and the two men even recorded a cover version of the Andrea True Connection’s 1976 disco classic, “More, More, More.” Which is just what they did. In 2003, according to The New Yorker, they sold more products in Italy than Gucci, Prada, Armani and Versace.
Around this time, Dolce & Gabbana stopped being a pair — at least a romantic one. But in interviews, Mr. Gabbana talked openly about wanting children and made it clear he wasn’t referring to adoption.
Instead, the two spent the next several years fighting charges of tax evasion. They were convicted in 2013 and given a 20-month suspended sentence, only to have that reversed and the conviction vacated by Italy’s highest court in October 2014.
This February, they showed their latest collection in Milan. It drew heavily on that iconography and paid homage to mothers. Some of the models came down the runway holding babies. Others wore sweaters that said “I love you, Mama.”
Shortly thereafter came the Panorama interview, where the designers expressed apparent opposition to gay families.
“They’re alienating a large portion of the customer base,” said Ed Filipowski, the president of KCD, one of the fashion industry’s largest public relations firms. “They’re alienating women or anyone trying to have a child in vitro and they’re alienating their L.G.B.T. constituency. It’s a serious issue.” (He added that he found Elton John’s comments on the matter commendable.)
In what may turn out to be a P.R. problem in Hollywood, Dolce has long been a favorite on the red carpet. In 2011, Scarlett Johansson was decked out in a fitted lavender dress with a floral pattern. A year later, Selena Gomez showed up to the Vanity Fair in a gray sleeveless dress.
Terrence Howard wore a Dolce tuxedo to the Kodak Theater this year. In the auditorium, he sat near Ms. Wintour, whose daughter, Bee Shaffer, arrived wearing a Dolce gown. (Also wearing Dolce at the Oscars: David Oyelowo and Channing Tatum.)
Now, all these people risk getting an earful from gay rights organizations and their publicists.
“We have our annual Media Awards Saturday night,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of Glaad, the gay rights organization. “We have a lot of people coming and we’re telling all of them that we would appreciate it if they not wear Dolce & Gabbana.”
Simon Halls, a founding partner of the entertainment public relations firm Slate PR, said: “I don’t think this is going to go away. I think people are really going to take them to task for this.”
“These are families they’re talking about,” said Mr. Halls, who himself is an in-vitro fertilization parent along with his husband, the actor Matt Bomer. “These are children. Everybody’s got their own personal issues. Those guys are allowed as people to have their own opinions. But they also are public figures and when they communicate that kind of hate filled speech, they are firing up other like minded people in the most irresponsible way possible. It’s dangerous and despicable.”
Some of the anger appeared to go beyond gay rights.
Lynn Hirschberg, the editor at large at W Magazine, suggested that the designers’ heavy-handed behavior in the past was part of the reason the reaction has been so harsh.
“They’ve been unkind and difficult for many, many years, and people have been waiting to respond,” she said. “This is an all debts must be paid kind of thing.”
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