Dolce & Gabbana was the biggest winner at Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker’s lavish wedding in Italy.
The Italian luxury label’s stamp was all over the couple’s Portofino nuptials last weekend, with the happy couple spending time on the designers’ yacht, exchanging “I dos” at the Dolce & Gabbana-owned Villa Olivetta and ferrying guests to and fro in boats upholstered in the fashion house’s signature prints.
And Dolce & Gabbana outfitted not just the bride and groom, but also the entire Kardashian-Jenner family throughout the weekend, providing a series of archival designs for sisters Kim, Khloé, Kylie and Kendall and matriarch Kris, and even matching bridesmaid and ring bearer looks for Kourtney and Travis’ children.
While the brand was quick to shut down reports that it had sponsored the festivities — “the designers were happy to host this very special occasion,” a rep for Dolce & Gabbana tells Page Six Style — the wedding has already earned the company a whopping $25.4 million in media impact value, according to brand performance firm Launchmetrics, more than half of the total $47 million generated by the event thus far.
“Media impact value is how we assign a monetary value to brand performance. It calculates the value of every post, every interaction, every article,” Launchmetrics CMO Alison Bringé tells us, adding that since it’s only been a few days since Kravis tied the knot, these numbers are “super preliminary” and will continue to grow over the course of the week.
“It’s a crazy amount of media impact value for the first 24 [or so] hours,” she adds, pointing to Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas’ 2018 nuptials in India — which spanned multiple days and similarly included endless outfit changes — for comparison.
“When we measured [their wedding] at a high point, it was $91 million,” Bringé continues, adding that Ralph Lauren generated almost $22 million of that value by dressing Chopra and Jonas for their ceremony — a number Dolce & Gabbana has already surpassed with the Kravis nuptials.
Much of that impact, of course, stems from the famous family’s staggering social media presence; combined, the Kardashian-Jenners have amassed more than 1.2 billion Instagram followers. Add to that the tidal wave of press coverage that accompanies any Kardashian social post or public outing, and it’s easy to see why reality TV’s first family is incredibly attractive to fashion brands.
Or at least fashion brands that aren’t afraid of a little controversy. For all their fans and followers, after all, the Kardashians have been accused of everything from cultural appropriation to faking their net worth to perpetuating unattainable standards of beauty; even the Kravis wedding itself is ruffling feathers. And in that sense, Dolce & Gabbana might just be their perfect partner.
The label’s eponymous designers have faced a series of scandals themselves. In 2015, they made offensive comments about gay adoption and IVF — the very fertility treatment, incidentally, that Kourtney and Travis are currently using to expand their family — before later acknowledging their “inappropriate” remarks.
And in 2018, Dolce & Gabbana released a racially insensitive video ad ahead of its (later canceled) fashion show in Shanghai.
But just like the Kardashians, who time and time again have managed to bounce back from their various controversies, it seems Dolce & Gabbana can’t be canceled. The label’s continued to have a strong presence on the red carpet, dressing stars for the 2022 Oscars, Grammys, Met Gala and Cannes Film Festival.
And now, it’s “hosted” one of the biggest celebrity weddings of the year — albeit for the family co-founder Stefano Gabbana once dubbed “the most cheap people in the world.”
Seems there’s millions of reasons he’d have changed his mind since.
