Dolce & Gabbana Make Diamonds & Pearls

Prince isn’t the only icon to sing the praises of Diamonds and Pearls, now the famous fashion duo, Dolce & Gabbana, are getting in on the act.

To celebrate over two decades of their successful partnership, the tony twosome is launching a new book appropriately titled, Diamonds & Pearls, which Domenico Dolce describes as “an invitation to the public into our own personal world: one of luxury, intense pleasure and seduction, but also a dreamlike world featuring grotesque and ambiguous situations that verge on the paradoxical”.

Fashion designers love their paradoxical adjectives, don’t they just?

The book is a collaboration with the Austrian photographer Guenter Parth, whom they chose because he specializes in still-life images. The fashion that graces the pages was personally selected by D & G to highlight jewelry of all kinds – from gemstones to diamonds, gold leaves to pearls.

And in a bizarre turn, the clothes are not worn by models but by what the pair call three “real dolls”, or lifelike mannequins made to bear a striking resemblance to real women and built following specifications for their “ideal woman”.

“The three dolls symbolize the perfect woman: we deliberately chose not to take any top model as an aesthetic reference when we made them,” Gabbana explains to The National Newspaper.

I’m not sure that their ultimate muse, Madonna, would approve of replacing flesh and blood with mannequins that are three hairs shy of a blow-up doll in couture, but I suppose anything goes in the name of art.

The book retails for $270 and is available in select D & G boutiques worldwide. All proceeds benefit children's charity, Butterfly Onlus Foundation.