With his fledgling menswear collection, Albino D'Amato has his eyes on the young and the trendy. But his namesake women's line is the height of elegance and ladylike propriety—occasionally, a little too much so. For his pre-fall range, D'Amato was thinking of the cocktail dressing of the fifties and sixties. The emphasis, you sensed, fell on the former, and you can barely get more proper than that. So there were plenty of kimono-sleeved cocoon coats in a haute-looking wool mohair tweed, and little cocktail dresses bedecked with a floral lace D'Amato had remade from a fifties original. Packing more punch were a few simple asymmetrical, color-blocked shifts—ageless but ever appropriate.
