No. 21 Fall 2012
Word has reached Milan that it’s Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee this year, and No. 21′s Alessandro Dell’Acqua, for one, is showing his admiration for the British monarch-in a way of speaking. True, you are not especially more likely to spot Her Majesty going around in a miniskirt along with her bra showing anytime soon, nonetheless it was a fantasy in regards to the ruler “in private, within the garden and within the country,” that set the designer off; for fall, he chose salt-and-pepper tweeds, gray menswear suiting, and embroidered paste emeralds and crystal stones on a pleated A-line skirt-in his mind, an at-home chunk of crown jewels. Oh, and the jet-beaded gloves? What she’d wear for gardening, obviously.
No, it doesn’t make sense, or read at the runway either-but Dell’Acqua’s clothes, and how he layers them, have charm. His first look, a tweed bomber over another tweed shirt and a tiny beaded, cutaway A-line pelmet, neatly captured the recent proportions of giant top–small bottom, in addition to the layering of outerwear we’ve been seeing in Long island and London this season. His two-tone tweeds and the grey micro-checked fabric (cut right into a few neat, high-waisted coats) are fused onto neoprene, making them a lighter, springier twenty-first-century proposition than they to start with appear. Other points to notice on this collection: how Dell’Acqua used lingerie, sliding lace-edged slips and layered pink camisoles into his outfits. At one time, Dell’Acqua was known for sexy dressing involving lots of underwear on display, but here is different and more quirky. Even supposing many of the jeweling veers a little too with regards to Prada, this rare, independent voice within the Italian fashion industry is doing something small-scale but worth watching.
