Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana named the collection Stravaganza Siciliana, and the idea is a rejection of how identical everyone has started to look, online and on the street. I love that as a premise, partly because it is a little rude. Basta with the matching tank tops and cutoff jeans, ladies.

Dolce explained it as a granddaughter in an aristocratic Palermo family going into the family wardrobe and finding clothes from the twenties, the fifties and the seventies, then mixing everything instinctively. It is one of the liveliest things they have shown in years, and I think it works because it is loose.

What I like is that the pairings are never obvious. A hand-tatted white crocheted skirt gets a black lace bra. Chunky tweeds are worn with the delicate linen of a trousseau. A coral-encrusted jacket comes with not much more than tap pants. A fur-edged devoré silk robe, a bit Paul Poiret, gets pulled into the present by oversized boyfriend jeans. That last one is my favorite and it is the whole idea in one outfit. Wear the fancy thing with the plain thing.

More than half of the 81 looks have lace, crochet or eyelet, and it is the thread that keeps such a mixed collection from falling apart. It shows up against tougher things, like denim and leopard, which is what keeps it from reading as sweet. I would say that is the lesson for anyone shopping the trend. Lace works best when something in the outfit is arguing with it. The leopard and the denim are doing exactly that job.

They also dip into their own archives. The old D&G logo tee goes with a fancy tweed jacket and a leopard chiffon skirt, a nod to clients who tell them how they spent their youth in the shuttered diffusion line.

The two thousands count as vintage now, which is a sentence that makes me feel old, but the clothes look fresh. I think the smartest move is that none of it is treated as sacred. A logo tee and a tweed jacket is just a mix. Nobody is pretending it is anything else.