SPENDING POWER OF A RICH PATRON “Stefano Gabbana, the fashion designer, leaned on the railing of his yacht, the Regina d'Italia, and smiled. His neighbors in the Portofino marina were enjoying an early evening aperitivo on the deck of the Ester III - an enormous vessel, with a helipad on top and a transparent- swimming pool on the lower deck, that had drawn admiring stares from pedestrians on the quay all afternoon. The neighbors waved; he waved back. .’A client,’ he said, with the air of confiding an obvious secret. “It was a Wednesday evening in July, the week after most French and Italian haute-couture houses had defied a heat wave in Paris to show their latest collections. Temperatures had reached the mid-nineties in Milan, too, where, at the air-conditioned atelier of Dolce & Gabbana, designers and seamstresses had worked into the night completing the company’s version of haute couture, the Alta Moda collection. Launched four years ago by Gabbana, fifty-two, and his business partner of thirty years, Domenico Dolce, fifty-seven, Alta Moda consists of one-of-a-kind, made-to-measure pieces: virtuoso demonstrations of what can be achieved sartorially when the imagination of a designer and the spending power of his patron are given unconstrained expression.” Rebecca Mead, ‘The Couture Club, the World’s Wealthiest Clients Gather by the Mediterranean to Shop,” in the New Yorker, September 21, 2015, pp. 76-87.