It’s been a busy season for Alessandro Dell’Acqua: In addition to presenting his collection for No. 21 in Milan, he unveiled a collaboration with Tod’s during Paris Fashion Week. “I’m a little tired,” he conceded backstage before his show for Rochas, held in the sunlit foyer of the Théâtre National de Chaillot opposite the Eiffel Tower.
To say that he kept it simple this season would be to do him a disservice. There was nothing simple about the couture-quality fabrics he deployed, which ranged from rippling silk duchesse to lustrous velvet, painstakingly stitched with thousands of ostrich feathers.
Dell’Acqua got them from French suppliers who worked for big Paris houses like Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent in the Seventies. “For the warped leopard print, we did some tests and we managed to make it with taffeta, using looms that had been left a little idle,” he explained.
Rather, he let the fabrics do the talking. Instead of trying to emulate those legendary designers with retro couture silhouettes, dell’Acqua went for loose, boxy cuts, whether on a crinkled, taffeta buttonless coat in a mouthwatering shade of peach, or on a double-breasted pant suit in his signature powder pink.
The designer added a dash of drama

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Karl Lagerfeld drew inspiration from Argentina for his spring collection, with a tango dance hall palette of red, black and white.
He toggled between tailored looks, like a belted red coat dress with zippered sleeves, and more casual fare, such as snap-button track pants in a floral pattern dotted with circular logos. Safari jackets featured traditional “guarda pampa” woven trims, while a tiered black maxi skirt was topped with a blood red biker jacket.
For his younger constituency, Lagerfeld offered T-shirts, sweatshirts and leggings with neon piping details. This season, they can even get the accessories to match: Among the more casual handbag offerings were totes in squishy leather and oversize bum bags.
Saffiano totes covered in a Lagerfeld ticker-tape logo were customized with the names of key cities. Buenos Aires naturally among them.

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Never mind that he just sold his company to Puig. For Dries Van Noten, fashion is personal. “The way you gesture, the way that you stand…” he said postshow. “It is an attitude, [which] can be also quite negative, but I love people who can have an attitude.”
And people with attitude — read: confident, adult women — are Van Noten’s primary constituency. They love fashion and acknowledge trends that make sense for them, but never go crazy. Van Noten gets it.
He also gets casualization and a good contrast. A master of the latter, for fall he started with a category he loves: workwear. “What is more beautiful?” he queried, playing the collection against couture references, which he kept in careful check. “I don’t want to make couture, I like to make clothes,” Van Noten said, almost contradicting his own oppositional construct. Almost. Van Noten is a pragmatist with a yen for the outsized flourish of the haute variety, and incorporated some references here.
But as always, Van Noten started with function. There, too, he wielded his hand deftly, sometimes with full pieces — anoraks, pocketed popovers, utility coats — and sometimes with the addition of big pockets on coats or skirts. The

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EARLY BIRD: Despite giving one of her first live performances since the birth of her daughter Kulture, Cardi B was among the guests filing into the 10 a.m. Mugler show in Paris on Wednesday.
The “Bodak Yellow” rapper posed for photographers in a tailored black jacket that was cut open in the back to reveal sheer cycling shorts with lacing details — as well as a glimpse of her black thong. She was up at 6 a.m. getting her makeup done for the show.
“It was really hard for me to get up this morning because, you know, the time difference — I’m still in an America time frame in my head — so I was like, ‘Oh, man!’ But you gotta do it. Gotta work!” she said with a bright smile.

Cardi B 
Stephane Feugere

The rapper is riding high despite her high-profile brawl with Nicki Minaj at the Harper’s Bazaar Icons party during New York Fashion Week.
She performed at the Etam lingerie event in Paris on Tuesday night, a day after “Girls Like You,” her track with Maroon 5, made it to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, making her the first female rapper with three Billboard number-one singles.

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COSTUME PARTY: There’s no slowing perennial overachiever Karl Lagerfeld, who has designed two Chanel costumes for the pas de deux of “Bolero,” which will be performed by Diana Vishneva, prima ballerina of the Mariinsky Ballet, and Aurélie Dupont, director of dance at the Paris Opera Ballet, at the latter company’s opening gala at the Palais Garnier on Thursday night.
The performance will be part of a new entry into the repertory of the Paris Opera Ballet: “Decadance” by Ohad Naharin, one of the world’s foremost contemporary choreographers, as a one-shot special appearance.
“Ravel’s ‘Boléro’ has always been one of my most favorite pieces of music in the world,” Lagerfeld said. “It was the first classical record I bought when I was 16 years old.”
Dupont said that after weeks of rehearsing for a show, “where we work on the positions and reflect on the role, putting on the costume allows us to completely metamorphose, to embody a role.”
“The costume is the finishing touch that allows you to become the character,” she added.
Opening with the presentation of the Ballet Corps — a tradition established by Serge Lifar, a friend of Gabrielle Chanel — where the opera dancers will parade to “La Marche des Troyens” by

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FOREVER YOUNG: Mastermind, the magazine created by fashion stylist Marie-Amélie Sauvé, has put together a photography exhibition celebrating youth, a theme of its fourth issue, which came out Sept. 3.
Housed at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in the Marais, “A Generation” features the work of three photographers — Jamie Hawkesworth, Charles Fréger and Raimond Wouda. It opens today and will run until Oct. 6.
“We wanted to put the spotlight on younger generations at school,” explained Sauvé at the opening night on Tuesday. “But also to highlight the differences within the same generation.”
“A Generation” showcases two photo series that were commissioned for the magazine. Fréger paid a visit to students at Gordonstoun school in Scotland (Prince Charles is an alumni) while Wouda visited elementary schools in the Netherlands.
“I had already done a similar series shot between 2003 and 2007,” said Wouda. “Within the same age group, I saw a really big difference shooting the same project 15 years later: before, the kids had all this energy and were running around all the time. Nowadays, all they do is stare at their phones.”
The exhibition featured a shot of teenagers at Sint-Nicolaaslyceum in Amsterdam, hanging out near their lockers. Most of them are wearing

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British Airways has turned to London designer Ozwald Boateng to design new uniforms for its 32,000-person staff.
The OBE-honored designer, who launched a women’s collection earlier this year, will have his work cut out for him shadowing British Airways employees to get a better understanding of the demands of their various jobs. Boateng will be figuring out just how the uniforms need to hold up and will have booking agents, pilots, in-flight crew and other employees wear test the uniforms before final designs are approved. The airline’s new look is being ironed out in advance of the airline’s centennial next year.
In addition to its employees, the company is looking to make passengers more comfortable by investing nearly $5.3 billion in improved Wi-Fi, new interiors in long-haul aircraft and 72 new aircraft, among other things. Boateng has plenty of archival material to draw from, including 400 British Airways uniforms from the Thirties to the present day, and a library of thousands of historical images. British Airways’ chairman and chief executive officer Álex Cruz said, “Our uniforms have been an iconic symbol of our brand throughout our 100-year history and our partnership with Ozwald will take us forward to the next chapter in

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The city’s loss of stars says more about the Guide than it does about the vibrancy of Chicago dining.

Two iconic brands are exiting the prestigious watch fair in Geneva next year.

Belowground, cellars and hallways form secret passageways; up above, there’s a pool, dock, and 200-year-old greenhouse.