The seemingly endless lockdown situations (which we still have to variously endure) have triggered quite different creative reactions in designers. While some have reverted to reassuring territory, just slightly refocusing and refreshing their familiar codes and signifiers, in others the time spent in quarantine has ignited more radical thinking, a shedding of old layers of constraint in favor of a more honest, truthful sense of self-representation.
Alessandro Dell’Acqua seems to have embraced the latter option. During a walkthrough of the No. 21 pre-fall collection at his Milanese headquarters (all the team safely masked and previously tested), he said with conviction that “the way forward for me is doing only what I firmly believe in, without distractions or compromise. It’s about going back to what made me fall in love with fashion in the first place what I truly like and what I stand for creatively. You cannot please everybody, nor do you have to give in and be forced into