Alessandro Dell’Acqua celebrates a decade at N°21

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Feb 19, 2020

You can’t keep a good man down, in life, in fashion and certainly not in Milan, where Alessandro Dell’Acqua celebrated the 10th anniversary of his brand N°21, with a salutary sophisticatedly sexy show.

In that decade Dell’Acqua has won a reputation for making exotic and suggestive clothes that manage not to cross the frontier into cheap or vulgar. And this excellent fall-winter 2020 collection maintained that sterling tradition.
 
Back in the Noughties, this Neapolitan designer lost control of his own name, but where most creators would have thrown in the towel, Dell’Acqua went back to work with gusto, and gave birth to N°21, one of Milan’s most loved brands. And one that broke the psychologically important 50-million-euro annual turnover barrier a couple of years ago.

The N°21 woman is an admirable gal. Very likely gym-attending; confident in her career; energetic and vey definitely sensual. For fall, Alessandro wants her to wear neatly rouched cocktails; guipure lace dresses or crocheted cardigans – all in black and finished with abstract fine metal bullion embroidery. He paired military coats and feathered redingotes with gentle, sky-blue mannish striped shirt dresses – to win a huge cheer at the finale of the show staged inside a raw Milanese garage that is his headquarters.
 

When his lady wants to make an entrance she throws on beige marabou feather cocktails – racy robber baron mistress style; or a deep-gorge cappuccino silk evening gown with a neckline trimmed with hefty golden chains. The same trim used on sling-backs, purses and clutches. And featured heavily on the designer’s Instagram account pre-show.
 
“It’s all my obsessions in N°21 since the beginning rolled into one show. The punks; the Milanese bourgeois; the masculine-feminine element; the sexy; all the obsessions but not nostalgic, and not celebratory, because I really don’t like that,” smiled Dell’Acqua before fellow designers Andrea Incontri and Francesco Scognamiglio embraced him in compliments.