Milan Fashion Week: Dolce & Gabbana spring/summer 2012

It was almost cruel. Just as the rest of Milan sat down to Sunday lunch, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana forced 1000 of fashion's most influential tastemakers to confront perhaps their greatest taboo: pasta.

The spring/summer 2012 Dolce & Gabbana collection presented was a mouth-watering paean to the Italian cucina that saw their catwalk transformed into a buffet heaped with the bounty of primavera .

Not everything was fattening (and certainly not any of the clothes): there were plenty of healthy, slimming vegetables. Handbags, necklaces, figure-hugging sheath dresses, décolletage-flaunting ruched tops, bustiers and jackets were decorated with enough pomodori , melanzane , cipollini and pepperoni to keep Jamie's Italian in verdure for months. There were some wonderfully kooky garlic-bulb earrings, and the beautiful yellow and green zucchini flower prints were guilt-free feast for the eyes.

The distressing bit for this institutionally carbohydrate-averse crowd (too much pasta and wearing those sample-size freebies becomes impossible) were the farfalle that fluttered on gold necklaces, and the rigatoni looped onto bracelets and bags. As Stefano Gabbana observed: "We have enough here for a wonderful al'arrabiata ."

Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue , said: "They were incredible edibles - and what about those aubergine hot pants?" She was, she added, looking forward to dinner.

Food, though, was only one element of a collection that riffed on a molto Dolce & Gabbana theme, that of an idealised Southern Italian village. The stage was bedecked with gaudy multicoloured lights as if for a summer saint's festival, handbags and soles on flat sporty sandals were prettily mottled in homage to the meshed plastic chairs scattered in most small-town Italian piazzas, jewellery jangled with golden Madonna and angel charms, and the multi-coloured raffia fringing on dresses could have been shredded directly from a trattoria tablecloth.

After that pasta and vegetable primi piatti , the designers put out a series of classic Dolce & Gabbana black dresses that started simply and unadorned then became increasingly ornate with beading and pretty flower details (actress Scarlett Johansson wore a blush version of the flower dress in the front row.) Those sporty flat sandals apart (first Christopher Kane , now here: that makes a new season trend), the models wore black high-heeled booties that were tantamount to lingerie for the feet.

Then, at the close, came a fashionland unreality-check for anyone actually contemplating eating that pasta rather than wearing it. Around 60 skinny models in corsets decorated in gold and silver, or encrusted with stones as colourful as the lights draped above, paraded to the photographers then posed en masse at the end of the catwalk.

Gabbana said: "The spirit here is enjoy your life - very Italian." And what all that food? "Food is everything: sex, everything. And the kitchen is for time when family are together."

Unless, that is, you're spending Sunday lunchtime sitting in a fashion show, fantasising about an enormous, steaming bowl of pasta. With lots and lots of cheese.