Maintaining separate personalities when designing two lines is never an easy feat. This season, Alessandro Dell’Acqua’s Rochas girl spilled over into his collection for No. 21. “It’s the erotic side of the bourgeoisie,” he said of his ladylike outfits with a whiff of “Belle de Jour.”
He opened with an all-black sequence of decorous staples done in glossy fabrics that gave them an off-kilter edge. Glazed chiffon lent a bin-liner sheen to a Forties-style button-up blouse, while a pencil skirt in faux patent ostrich leather shimmered like an oil slick.
A plain vest and skirt, meanwhile, were layered with a thick rhinestone chain that suggested the outline of a T-shirt, in a use of negative space with fetishistic overtones. Dell’Acqua dialed back his signature masculine tailoring, save for the boxy outerwear rendered in sculptural fabrics like a soft nude Neoprene.
“Some of them zip open to reveal a glimpse of bare back, and the shoes are very sexy,” he said backstage, pointing to the barely there sandals with transparent straps.
The designer kept embellishment to a minimum — a quartet of dresses trimmed in showy ostrich feathers, and a bugle-beaded slipdress that was a walking sparkle filter — and instead used couture-inspired volumes for
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