Romance Rekindles Under Sicilian Stars: Dolce&Gabbana’s Seductive Qixi Romance Across Time, Silk And Sicily

In Fukuoka, in the summer of 2006, fifteen-year-old Gianluca Bernardi first learned that love can travel farther than geography.

His father, Edoardo, after two successful decades running a restaurant in Florence, had accepted an invitation from a long-standing Japanese customer turned business associate to begin again in Fukuoka. Gianluca, unlike his sisters Marina and Chiara, who remained in Florence with their mother, chose to accompany his father. It was his first journey beyond Europe: exhilarating, bewildering, and faintly frightening.

Across the corridor of their new apartment lived a Japanese family they would barely encounter during those first weeks: a banker, his homemaker wife and their fifteen-year-old daughter, Orihime.

Edoardo made an audacious decision. Rather than placing Gianluca in an international school, he enrolled him in a Japanese high school. Armed principally with the Japan he had encountered through Italian-translated manga, Gianluca discovered that real Japan demanded considerably more than imagination: language, etiquette, discipline and patience.

Then there was Orihime. 

Seated beside him, she was fascinated by his English, delivered through an unmistakably Italian accent. His male classmates wanted to know about Valentino Rossi, Ferrari and whether Italian pasta really was superior to Japanese pasta. Orihime had more practical interests. She quietly asked Gianluca to help with her English homework; in exchange, she taught him Japanese.

Friendship followed. One afternoon, walking home together, they discovered the extraordinary coincidence: they lived in the same apartment building, on the same floor, directly opposite one another.

Then came Tanabata.

Orihime took Gianluca to a street celebration and introduced him to the Japanese Star Festival, whose familiar legend of Orihime and Hikoboshi derives from the Chinese Qixi tradition. She taught him to write a wish on a tanzaku—a coloured strip of paper—and hang it upon bamboo. He laughed at first. Then, secretly moved, he wrote one of his own. 

Four years later, the Bernardis returned to Florence after Edoardo and his former wife reconciled. Orihime and Gianluca parted without understanding that some wishes take extraordinarily long to mature.

Twenty years pass.

In Taormina, Sicily, Gianluca is now thirty-five, a successful restaurateur who has expanded his father’s Florentine legacy into the Mediterranean. Yet beneath the polish, there remains an unfinished chapter.

On Tanabata, a date he has long forgotten, Orihime walks into his restaurant.

She is thirty-five too, now a distinguished public-relations director for a prestigious Tokyo hotel group. She is wearing Dolce&Gabbana: a black dress from the Fall-Winter 2026 Velata theme, scattered with delicate roses like fragments of a secret garden. Gianluca, impeccably dressed in a Dolce&Gabbana custom-tailored suit, recognises her instantly.

Twenty years collapse in a heartbeat.

He takes the menu from the approaching waiter and walks towards her table himself.

When Orihime tilts her head upwards, she sees him.

The missing constellation of her life.

She asks him to surprise her with the restaurant’s speciality. He disappears into the kitchen. Soon Chianti flows, laughter returns and memory becomes dangerously vivid. Then she asks whether he remembers their tanzaku.

He does.

Hers, she reveals, had carried the same wish every year since he left Japan: to see him again.

It is, naturally, the sort of love story Dolce&Gabbana understands instinctively.

Because Qixi has always been about distance, desire and reunion.

Strictly speaking, Qixi is the Chinese festival celebrated on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month; Japan’s Tanabata is its culturally adapted counterpart, traditionally observed around 7 July and centred on the meeting of Orihime and Hikoboshi. 

Across East Asia, the story has evolved differently, but its emotional architecture remains remarkably intact: separation, longing, devotion and the hope of reunion. 

Today, from Shanghai and Hong Kong to Taipei, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, Qixi has become both cultural ritual and contemporary expression of romance. Its modern incarnation is also unmistakably commercial: flowers, jewellery, watches, handbags, beauty and fashion have transformed the festival into one of the region’s increasingly consequential luxury-shopping moments. 

Global houses have consequently learned that Asian consumers do not merely want a red heart stamped upon a product; they want a story that understands why the heart matters. 

That distinction makes Dolce&Gabbana’s 2026 interpretation particularly persuasive.

Founded in 1985, Dolce&Gabbana has spent more than four decades cultivating a visual vocabulary in which clothing is never merely clothing. Its fashion is arrival: black lace, sensual tailoring, animal print, Mediterranean exuberance, religious symbolism and unapologetic femininity converging into an almost cinematic spectacle.

For Qixi, the house turns that familiar maximalism towards intimacy.

Velata brings roses into deep black, allowing romance to emerge not as sweetness but as mystery. Leo Street makes leopard print an assertion of confidence rather than mere decoration. 

For men, Marina introduces nautical references with cleaner, sleeker lines, while DNA demonstrates the Dolce&Gabbana gift for making tailoring feel powerful without becoming ceremonious.

Then there are the pieces that make the edit particularly irresistible as gifts—or as the foundations of an autumn wardrobe.

The My Sicily handbag, with its soft sculptural contours, possesses precisely the kind of recognisable elegance that makes a romantic present feel personal rather than predictable. The lightweight, close-fitting Lipari shoes bring a sensual practicality to the wardrobe: the sort of pair designed not merely to be admired but worn through an evening that becomes a memory.

And then, inevitably, the Sacred Heart.

Appearing across the Devotion Fine Jewellery and Devotion Eyewear collections, it remains one of Dolce&Gabbana’s most potent emblems: devotion rendered tangible, theatrical and unmistakably Sicilian. For Qixi, it becomes an especially eloquent bridge between cultural traditions—between the ancient yearning of star-crossed lovers and the contemporary language of luxury gifting.

There is something wonderfully audacious about Dolce&Gabbana doing this.

The house does not attempt to become Asian. It does something more intelligent: it remains unapologetically Dolce&Gabbana while allowing its own mythology to converse with an Asian festival of love.

That is the secret of successful luxury in Asia today. Cultural relevance does not necessarily require literal translation. Sometimes it requires emotional translation.

And Dolce&Gabbana speaks fluently in that language.

Its new Qixi short film extends the idea through two contemporary couples moving through an urban landscape, their intimacy expressed through rhythm, proximity and effortless connection. 

The story is deliberately modern, yet beneath its polished imagery lies the same ancient proposition: love is meaningful because separation exists.

Perhaps that is why the collection feels more compelling than a conventional Valentine’s edit.

It is not simply about what one gives another person. It is about what one chooses to become when love enters the room.

A black rose dress. A sculptural Sicilian handbag. A perfectly cut suit. A pair of Lipari shoes. A Sacred Heart jewel.

Each is an object, certainly.

But in the Dolce&Gabbana universe, objects become declarations.

Back at their table, Gianluca and Orihime continues reminiscing the time they spent together in Fukuoka. Albeit it was just a brief phase of his teenage life, it remained glued in his mind. The flicker of candlelight on their table softened the ambient, and Orihime has never felt this intimate and intocicatingly amorous in Sicily.

Outside, Taormina glitters beneath the Sicilian night. The sea catches the moonlight. Somewhere between remembrance and revelation, the stars finally answer.

The conversation becomes intimate and the passion between them is heating up. Love is literally in the air. 

 They kiss.

And on Qixi, when the stars are said to grant separated lovers one miraculous night together, there could hardly be a more appropriate philosophy.

Because some clothes dress the body.

Dolce&Gabbana dresses the moment of arrival.

Dolce&Gabbana Fall/Winter 2026 Collection is available now in all Dolce&Gabbana boutiques worldwide. 

*Photos courtesy of Dolce&Gabbana.