Federico Capalbo, 32, is that rare thing, an Italian designing in London. And his collection Komakino, named after a Joy Division song and launched in 2007, is just as crossover as he is. The production is in Italy and that, along with Capalbo’s sexy austerity and the fact that’s he is Italian, gives a certain polish and sensuousness to this street wise collection. Shown in a small Paris gallery, it offered a stylistic dream vision of tough boys with an anarchic London accent. The clothes are slightly menacing in a quite elegant way. The basketball shorts in fine wool and Capalbo’s rendering of the MA-1 bomber jacket looked chic in black and grey. Capalbo mixed the sports shapes with tailoring, and treated the tailoring in sport fabric. He’s into slogans as evidenced by Komakino’s “High Tech Low Life” on shirt plackets and elsewhere. And he has inserted a certain surgical element with “biopsy” cuts that allow a slash of fluorescent color to shine through the seaming of his moody, dark pieces. RV