N°21 Fall/Winter 2024-25: Courage as a Design Ethos at Milan Fashion Week

At Milan Fashion Week, Alessandro Dell'Acqua presented N°21's fall/winter 2024-25 collection, centered on courage as a foundational value. The collection marks a shift from the sheer, ethereal pieces of the spring/summer 2024 season—tulle and chiffon dresses with visible white culottes, and white mini dresses with lace veils and gloves—to a more assertive wardrobe. Key pieces include leopard-print eco-furs, double-breasted bourgeois coats, ultra-mini skirts, furry boa scarves, collars peeking out from knits, and animalier patterns. The show featured light-reflecting accents, transparent fabrics, shoulder bags, and sharp slingbacks. Dell'Acqua articulates courage as the ability to revisit past clothing codes and adapt them to the present, exemplified by skirts cut laterally and held together by two straps. Bows are worn 'brutally,' shedding their innocent associations; a blood-red hue appears on cardigans and lightweight, cloud-like transparent dresses, now layered for protective effect. The N°21 woman is no longer whispering her sensuality but making it a declared strength, communicating through explicit garments without half-measures. Clothes become canvases for self-definition, embracing courage to be, to undress, to reveal parts of the body, to sink into a coat, or to 'build a new bon ton to destroy the archaic idea, clichés, and vices accumulated by images.' The collection was reported by Giulio Solfrizzi for Artribune.