Alberta Ferretti's fall 2022 collection is here. View every look:
How do you rewrite your design codes after decades? That’s the task Alberta Ferretti assigned herself about four years ago. Out went the goddess dresses she was long known for and in came collections grounded in day-to-day wardrobe essentials. Tailoring is integral to her reworked aesthetic and so is knit dressing; the shift was driven by the casualization of style and Ferretti’s newfound conviction that women can’t live on chiffon alone.
That’s still Ferretti’s line of thinking. Backstage today she was talking about fashion post-Covid. “Before the pandemic, fashion ‘spoke’ too much, then we shut down for two years. Now, women want to live,” she said, using words like personality and identity. Think of these, then, as clothes for real life, only amplified à la Ferretti. Her trousers are as full as ankle-length skirts, her sweaters are lacquered to look like “glacial light,” and her use of “eco-fur” is prodigious.
What was missing from much of this daywear was Ferretti’s trademark lightness. That’s why three ’60s-ish embellished black minishifts stood out—they looked not just weightless but effortless. The evening dresses that closed the show found her back on familiar ground, too: inserting panels of lace into silver lamé plissé, trimming the cuffs of a chiffon dress with deep rings of feathers, adding dramatic but playful caped hoods to a couple of other numbers.