This collection felt like concept-less Prada from another time: just very good, and aggressive in its womanliness—clothes for a feminine identity that rejects masculine colonization, and whose apparent lack of control is, in fact, an act of it.
There was a deliciously agonized aesthetic derangement in this Rochas collection that sometimes played on the eye as costume for some fantasy Fellini-shot remake of Belle de Jour. The Italian auteurship was provided by Alessandro Dell’Acqua, who said he had wanted to mine the house’s couture roots—like, of course—and whose clothes spoke in deeply bourgeois codes while simultaneously signaling a climax of volumized apostasy against them. The heaped embellishment in jet beads that rustled against oversize bouclé coats whispered of this rebellion.