Alessandro Dell'Acqua is always slightly off at a tangent from other people in Milan, and therein lies his potential to either charm or puzzle. Taken as a whole, his Spring collection was puzzling: part hippie chick, part demi-couture (even though you couldn't be categorically certain about it), a bit Pocahontas. He'd certainly received the Milan memo about fringing and cut and stitched it into tiered mixes of suede and ostrich, the best being a forest green modern flapper dress that came somewhere toward the end.
Still, what of the charm? Now that beige and nude colorations have become the thing of the moment, Dell'Acqua has come into his own, at least in parts. His talent for lingerie detailing looked strong in a little pink multilayered chiffon wrap dress with a black lace bra top, and carried over into his baby pink charmeuse tailored jacket, wrapped by a tulle cummerbund. Otherwise, it was hard to make sense of exactly where a gray seventies maxi dress in tissue-fine jersey fitted in, or, again, how that related to the lean, cream tailoring at the beginning. Perhaps it's pointless to ask for systemic organization on the runway here, though. Dell'Acqua is a small designer with a talent for making one-off gorgeous things rather than thinking big thoughts, and that's enough to keep him in business, season in, season out.
