Alessandro Dell’Acqua opened his show by doing the exact opposite of what you expect. No slow build. No grand reveal at the end. Instead, the models walked out immediately in what looked like a finale lineup—right at the start. A deliberate disruption. The logic came straight from 8½ by Federico Fellini, where the famous closing parade isn’t really an ending at all, but a kind of beautifully chaotic beginning. “And so, the film ends? No, that’s how it begins.” Exactly. That energy.

Another reference hovered quietly in the background: Sophie Calle and her book The Hotel, Room 47. Back in 1981, Calle took a job as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel—twelve rooms, twelve guests, twelve lives—and then did what only Sophie Calle would do. She didn’t just clean. She inhabited. Perfumes sprayed. Makeup sampled. Clothes tried on. Suitcases opened. Diaries read. It was intimate. Uncomfortable. Voyeurism turned into art. Dell’Acqua was clearly hooked, and the collection felt like it had been lifted straight from half-open drawers and hotel wardrobes: everyday knits beside evening dresses, familiar jumpers mixed with something much more loaded. “An idea of natural femininity,” he said. Unforced. Varied. Human.

The clothes played out like a cast of characters. It began in black—always black. The first look read as a quiet homage to the late stylist Melanie Ward and the sharp, pared-back minimalism she shaped alongside Helmut Lang. A little black dress with a white collar echoed a maid’s uniform. A gray sweater was thrown over a hastily wrapped pink taffeta skirt, like someone dressing quickly after something they probably shouldn’t talk about. (Yes, very hotel room. Very that morning-after feeling.) Furry stoles landed casually over herringbone opera coats, or sat atop ’40s-style floral dresses that felt like they could have wandered straight into a Pina Bausch Tanztheater piece.

As always with Dell’Acqua, there was plenty to obsess over. A perfectly cut deep-red hourglass coat. A black taffeta bustier that slyly revealed nude corsetry underneath—one of those details you only notice on the second glance. A slip dress softened by a veil of chiffon, hinting at being watched… or maybe just remembered. Severity rubbed up against eccentricity. Louche moments were reined in by flashes of propriety. Nothing tipped too far. Everything held tension.

Black, of course, dominated. It’s Dell’Acqua’s longtime obsession—and this season, it felt pointed. Across fashion right now, black keeps surfacing, like a collective pause button. A response to the mood of the world, maybe. “Black is a non-color,” he said, “it represents subtraction—but also a neutral space where new beginnings can be written.” Which feels quietly radical. Black not as an ending, but as potential.

Absence, in Dell’Acqua’s hands, doesn’t feel empty. It feels charged. Like something is about to begin.