Alessandro Dell’Acqua opened his show by inverting it. The models walked out in what would normally be the finale lineup — at the very start. The trick was borrowed from Federico Fellini’s 8½, where the closing parade isn’t a conclusion but a carnival of vanities, a beginning disguised as an ending. “And so, the film ends? No, that’s how it begins,” goes the exchange between Guido and Claudia. Dell’Acqua took that logic and applied it to the runway — wrong-footing the audience just enough to make them pay closer attention.

The second reference ran deeper and stranger. Conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s book The Hotel, Room 47 documents what happened when she took a job as a chambermaid at a Venetian hotel in 1981 — twelve rooms, twelve stories, an entire gallery of other people’s lives made temporarily accessible. Calle didn’t just tidy up. She spritzed her guests’ perfumes, tried on their clothes, rummaged through their suitcases, read their diaries, sampled their makeup. It was voyeurism elevated to art — intimacy with strangers through the things they leave behind.

Dell’Acqua was fascinated by that premise, and the collection took it as its organising principle: what might be found in someone else’s drawers, tried on, inhabited. The clothes carried that quality of the borrowed and the discovered — things that feel personal even when they don’t belong to you, that carry the trace of another life while fitting perfectly into your own.

It’s a rich conceptual framework for a fashion collection, and Dell’Acqua wore it lightly enough that the ideas enhanced the clothes rather than overshadowing them. The result was a show that began at the end and ended somewhere altogether more interesting.