An art student turned “fashion artist,” as he put it, Cavalli in the early 1970s earned commissions from Hermès and Pierre Cardin on the strength of his innovations in printing on leather. Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren sported his clothes on the streets of the Côte D’Azur. A Bergdorf Goodman ad summed up his appeal with purple praise: “With extraordinary abandon, young individualist Roberto Cavalli has captured Italy with his untamed suede sportswear . . . some wildly savage, some regally elegant.”
With the arrival of the Japanese avant-garde in the 1980s, however, Cavalli fell out of favor. “That was the beginning of Japanese fashion; everything went minimal,” he told The London Evening Standard. “Black and white. You understand it was not my time.” But “the Italian fashion designer with a gypsy soul” (as The New York Timescalled him) came roaring back to prominence once the first fires of Minimalism had subsided in the mid-1990s. With his helicopter, yacht, Ferraris, racehorses, clubs, vineyard, and nubile coterie, Roberto Cavalli crafted a public image as the prototypical Latin lover—and his animal-print, gilded, strass-covered, and lavishly embroidered sexpot gowns were as conspicuous as their creator.
But to dismiss Cavalli as simply a maker of tinseled fripperies would be too facile an analysis. Yes, Cavalli was the perfect man to redesign the classic Playboy Bunny costume; yes, he has crowed that “Excess is success.”But, the fashion critic Hamish Bowles wrote, “The sheer, outrageous courage of Cavalli’s convictions allows him to filter and shake up influences and make them all his own.”less
Cavalli is as much an haute hippie as he is a red-carpet king. Craft is as much a part of the equation as éclat. A dissection of his more recent work reveals not only leopard prints, deep décolletages, and leather, but solid tailoring (often styled to offset the soft flow of chiffon), delicate Liberty florals, and virginal whitework. Cavalli shows offer drama; the clothes deliver the same.
