Italian fashion designer celebrated glamour, excess
Roberto Cavalli, the Italian fashion designer who celebrated glamour and excess, sending models down the runway and actresses onto red carpets wearing leopard- print dresses, bejeweled distressed jeans, satin corsets and other unapologetically flashy clothes, has died. He was 83.
His company announced the death on Instagram but provided no details.
Cavalli’s signature style — “molto sexy, molto animal print and molto, molto Italiano,” as British newspaper The Independent once described it — remained essentially unchanged throughout his long career. But he skillfully reinvented his clothes for different eras, enjoying several renaissances and building a global lifestyle brand in the process.
In the 1970s, Cavalli designed jackets, jeans and minidresses made from patchwork denim, selling his upscale hippie frocks in a boutique in St. Tropez, on the French Riviera, to actresses such as Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren.
For the next two decades, he remained largely unknown outside Europe. Then, in the 1990s, he reinvented luxury denim, first with the sandblasted look and then, in a stroke of invention, by putting Lycra in jeans to make them fit snugger and sexier. When model Naomi Campbell wore a pair during a runway show in 1993, stretch jeans became a huge trend.
Before that breakthrough, Cavalli’s business was foundering, and he had considered closing his factory. But from the mid1990s onward, he was one of the biggest names in fashion, with stores around the world, celebrity admirers including Lenny Kravitz and Cindy Crawford and licenses for products from jewelry, perfume and sunglasses
Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli commands the stage at his fashion show in 2013 in the Montenegrin coastal town of Budva.
to children’s clothes, housewares and a Roberto Cavalli- branded vodka, which came packaged in a snakeskin- covered bottle.
Like ( Gianni) Versace or Calvin ( Klein), Cavalli achieved single- name status: He stood for an immediately recognizable aesthetic.
“Roberto loved excess, but he never lost his point of view,” Nina Garcia, the editor- in- chief of Elle magazine, said in an email in 2020. “Even when minimalism was the norm, he believed in maximalism. He dressed us thinking that life — and fashion — should be lived at full speed.”
Cavalli’s attention- grabbing, flesh- baring clothes were not for introverts. Nor was his brand intellectual. Rather, Cavalli played to fashion’s fun, flamboyant, hedonistic side.
Peter Dundas, who served as the brand’s chief designer and later as creative director before leaving in 2016, said in an interview that Cavalli was for “the pop star that exists within everybody.”
Cavalli dressed actual pop stars, too. Among them were Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Shakira and the Spice Girls, for whom he designed outfits for their 2007 reunion tour. Two years earlier, Playboy had hired him to revamp the bunny costume.
Kravitz was another
client, a man confident enough to wear a pair of tight leather trousers. “I’m a big fan of the way Miles Davis dressed, in skins and prints and leather, with an urban class and a street vibe, but elegant,” Kravitz told Vanity Fair in a 2009 profile of Cavalli. “Roberto has that.”
Permanently bronzed and forever puffing on a cigar, Cavalli pursued a lifestyle that was as rock ’ n’ roll as his clothes. He piloted his own iridescent purple helicopter, sailed the Mediterranean in a matching purple yacht and lived with his family in an ancient, rambling farmhouse outside Florence, Italy. He met Eva Duringer, who would become his second wife and his business partner, when he was a judge at the 1977 Miss Universe pageant and she was Miss Austria.
But although Cavalli was a clever marketer who created an aura of luxury around his brand and his persona, he was also a master craftsperson who invented new ways to print, dye and manipulate fabrics. And he mixed materials, color, patterns and prints with an enviable flair.
During a talk at the University of Oxford in 2013, Cavalli summed up his personal ethos this way: “Fashion that is not crazy is not fashion.”