Perma-tanned Italian designer with a taste for excess
Known as the “king of bling”,
Roberto Cavalli made his
name designing maximalist
outfits in the 1970s that were worn by the likes of Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot; and he kept the faith when other designers embraced a more severe, paredback style. Minimalism (or “meeen-imal-eeezmo”, as he put it) was “anathema to him”, said The Daily Telegraph, and “gravity-defying dresses”, distressed denim, and animal print remained his stock in trade, a look summed up by The Independent as “molto sexy, molto animal print and molto, molto Italiano”. A perma-tanned hedonist, Cavalli claimed to be the only straight man in fashion (he once helped Hugh Hefner revamp his Playboy Bunny outfits) and he lived a jet-set life of “unabashed extravagance”.
Roberto Cavalli was born in Tuscany in 1940. Four years later, his father – a surveyor – was lined up against a wall by the Nazis and shot, in reprisal for partisan attacks. A shy child, he inherited his artistic flair from his mother, a seamstress whose father was an impressionist painter. He studied textile design at the Istituto d’Arte in Florence, and later came up with his own technique for printing on fabrics. His early designs were floral, but then “I started to appreciate that even fish have a fantastic coloured ‘dress’”, he told Vogue. “I start to understand that God is really the best designer, so I started to copy God.”
He opened his first shop, in St Tropez, in 1972. He almost went bankrupt in the 1980s, when power dressing was in fashion, but experienced a major revival in the 1990s, thanks in part to his pioneering use of stretch denim (with Lycra) and sandblasted denim. Madonna, Lenny Kravitz and Britney Spears were among those who wore his designs. Meanwhile, his animal prints appeared on diffusion lines; in clubs that bore his name; and even on luxury cars. He designed his own Batman-inspired superyacht, and kept a menagerie of exotic animals at his home in Tuscany. “Excess is success,” he liked to say. Twice divorced, he is survived by his six children.