Roberto Cavalli (Q4590)
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Italian clothing company
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Roberto Cavalli |
Italian clothing company |
Statements
4 references
2023
head of shoes
2003
designer
1970
designer
consultant
Just Cavalli Donna project
2006
catwalk model
senior designer
Attendees at amfAR’s Las Vegas gala last month got a sneak peek at this Roberto Cavalli pre-fall collection when designer Fausto Puglisi arrived arm-in-arm with the actress Juno Temple and in matching black-and-white florals, hers with hand-applied gold detailing tracing the outlines of blossoms, a technique the designer admired on both antique Chinese pottery and Cavalli’s earliest work.The house founder, who died in April of this year, was notorious for the suggestiveness of his clothes. He got less credit for his obsession with textiles, which he mixed and matched with kaleidoscopic verve, but they were just as essential to the hot-blooded appeal of his clothes. Puglisi, too, is a bit of a fabric freak, and he put his enthusiasm to work in this collection, taking cues from the perennially inspirational Marchesa Luisa Casati.The slip dress pictured here, which combines two incandescent fil coupés, one in swimming pool blue, the other in deep forest green, with bronze lace, and is punctuated by a contrasting velvet obi belt, showcases that enthusiasm to vivid effect. More sweet than sultry, it also reconfigures the familiar Cavalli silhouette. “I’m talking about a different kind of woman,” Puglisi said on a Zoom call from Vegas. “It’s not 20 years ago anymore.”With his pre-season collections, Puglisi has to talk to many different kinds of women and men, and so there’s quite a bit of variety here, ranging from Cavalli-isms including caftans and pajama sets to pieces more aligned with Puglisi’s own inclinations, like satin souvenir bomber jackets and sleek yet curvy printed tuxedos of the kind the photographer Ellen von Unwerth was seen in all over this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The something-for-everyone approach can tend to water down a designer’s point of view, but there’s a lot of life in this Cavalli collection.
3 December 2024
Roberto Cavalli “was the party,” as he reminded us tonight in a voiceover taped many years ago, so the first Cavalli show since his passing was never going to go off without one. Fausto Puglisi made sure of that when he enlisted Mariacarla Boscono, Alek Wek, Isabeli Fontana, Natasha Poly, Joan Smalls, Karen Elson, and Eva Herzigova to model the glamazonian dresses the late designer was famous for.Puglisi has been at Cavalli now for three-and-a-half years and he’s made it over in that time. While it’s still one of the louder brands in Milan, it’s subtler than it was in the house founder’s era. That’s down to Puglisi’s efforts to find the everyday in Cavalli. Those seven knockout event dresses will grab this season’s headlines, as they were intended to; Herzigova et al were channeling the old-school va-va-voom, after all. But the collection that preceded them struck a different note: beachy and chilled-out; sexy, but not trying too hard.Its starting point was Puglisi’s Sicilian hometown of Messina. The collection began with a series of white looks inspired by Messina’s houses, rope detailing evoking its seaside location. These were clothes to pack for holidays, with skin-baring cutouts, and short hems or high slits, often in pre-rumpled fabrics that won’t look worse-for-wear as temperatures rise. Puglisi spared a moment for neutrals, including a “fishing net” cover-up and faux snakeskin tailoring, designed for sight-seeing perhaps. Then he dove into photo prints of electric sunsets and crashing waves; they animated slip dresses and pajama sets all the way up to a goddess dress with a built-in capelet.The culmination of the collection was a trio of mermaid dresses that redeemed that oft-maligned red carpet silhouette—these were stretchy, where so many special occasion dresses are uptight and stiff. This might be Puglisi’s most important contribution to Cavalli’s sexy brand of dressing: ease and comfort are what make it modern.
18 September 2024
Fausto Puglisi has been seen on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival this week, vamping alongside the model Natasha Poly—his “Venus”—and loving every minute of it. Cannes is native territory for the Roberto Cavalli brand. The house founder, who died last month at 83, couldn’t take credit for the term “glamazon” (it actually dates all the way back to 1943 when it was used to describe the 6’2” actress Dorothy Ford), but he deserves much credit for our contemporary understanding of the word.The collection Puglisi designed for resort operates in a lower key, as pre-season offerings tend to do, but not much lower. Circa Y2K Cavalli is flying off the racks at vintage stores around the world with a new generation of young people yearning to do some vamping of their own. Puglisi’s resort mood board is full of their photos and many of his new clothes are made in their image: a thigh-grazing slip with zebra stripes, a silky button-down leotard that arches above hip bones exposed by a low-slung mini, and an excellent pair of waistband-less wide-leg jeans slashed, as if by claws, with more animal stripes.But Puglisi didn’t overdo the youth angle, knowing from experience that women well into their 40s and 50s are often still hungry to release their inner glamazons, even if, or perhaps because of the way the culture loses interest in them as they age. For them, he did a swaggy trench in graphic black-and-white zebra, and a mannish pantsuit in a vivid rose print treated with the crinkly froissée technique that was a Cavalli signature. To cap everything off? The cowboy hat, which is suddenly everywhere thanks to Beyoncé, who is herself quite a Puglisi fan.
7 June 2024
A kinder, gentler Cavalli. Backstage before his show at the Italian Stock Exchange tonight, Fausto Puglisi lamented about the state of the world, “which is not happy,” and the overexposure of women on social media, “which is disturbing in a way.” It was time, he thought, for a pivot.Out went the Miami Beach pink of last season and the animalia of the season before and in came something more personal: his obsession with Italian marble. Prints are at the root of Cavalli (along with denim), but the house founder preferred animals and vegetables to minerals. Puglisi returned from a trip home to Sicily over the Christmas holiday with photographs of local churches and other historical buildings and used the various kinds of marble found there as a basis for his collection.“For the first time since I’m here, I wanted to follow my own direction,” he said, “so not using prints from the archive, and [instead] using the codes in terms of slip dress, bias-cut, plissé, and dévoré, but translating them in a way that’s, let’s say, more urban and more tough.” It was a good instinct, and a reminder that successful brand revivals depend less on how closely a designer buys into the house’s original style and more on how much they believe in their own vision.But strong might be a better word than tough, because there was a welcome softness to the Fortuny-esque pleats on a camisole and midi-skirt set, and on the swingy dress with a cape-like back in a velvet patterned to look like ornate wallpaper. Though the techniques used to reproduce marble’s veins and flakes on the floor-length dévoré dresses were doubtless complicated, the clingy results looked easy to wear while remaining elegant. And the same can be said for the crinkly slip dresses whose mottled prints almost looked tie-dyed.The Cavalli purists—glamazons is what they used to be called—shouldn’t worry too much about Puglisi’s change of direction. There were plenty of skin-baring cocktail dresses and skirts with ultra-short hemlines in the mix. But the collection’s best pieces were the ones with more material, because the material itself was the story.
21 February 2024
Clothes not concepts—or as he puts it, “no bullshit”: that’s what Fausto Puglisi is driven to deliver as his stewardship of Roberto Cavalli canters on. Even at 9 am sharp on a mightily cold Milan morning this week, the fiery Sicilian’s passion for his gig was boiling over. “You editors always want stories—blah, blah, blah—and there is one here. But the truth is that I think a lot about the demographic of women for whom it’s my job to make a wardrobe. That’s why I love speaking with retailers, to understand what their customers are telling them they are looking for… and what they show me is that they are looking for clothes to communicate fun, freedom, and not giving a shit about judgment. She creates herself. That is a statement about power, and about freedom, and I like it very much.”Puglisi translated that brief into a punchily robust Spaghetti Western of a collection that played as casually with transnational codes of worn Americana as the rest of the world does with the cultural integrity of Italian food. An Appaloosa print (a nice Cavalli nod), a bandana print that incorporated Zebra stripe within the originally central Asian paisley, gaucho hats, swirling malachite prints (plus stone-set accessories), and finally a sharkskin-over-zebra print were his key decorative ingredients. These were served on form-fitting dresses in clingy chenille, floaty chiffon, dévoré metallics, amphibian-slick sequin, and intensely textured velvet. There were pajama sets, big-silhouette separates, tailoring in an incongruous Milanese tonal herringbone, plus red white and blue wools sometimes embroidered with desert florals. Mega-puffers in bandana print, boot-cut denim, fringed leather skirts, and a murderously tough cracked leather trench, also fringed, completed the posse of Puglisi proposals. The red-bloodedly abundant Florentine maximalism that is at the soul of Cavalli was further amplified through the house’s fang-heeled footwear and tiger-head handbags.“These are pieces that I want people, real people, to understand immediately,” said Puglisi: “And that’s it.”
11 December 2023
It was as balmy as Miami in July at the Italian Stock Exchange in Milan tonight. Roberto Cavalli’s Fausto Puglisi dressed the space in jungly greenery, and being a man generous with his enthusiasms, he thoroughly transformed the place. People were fanning themselves and it wasn’t because the market had just crashed.The collection that charged through all those palm fronds was just as exuberant. In a follow-on from last season, which was the first time Puglisi committed to Cavalli-esque levels of excess since signing on at the brand in 2020, these clothes were fully loaded—with feather prints, with feather embellishments, with denim embellishments in the shapes of feathers, and no small amount of exposed décolleté or bared midriff.In silhouette and vibe, it was true to Cavalli’s hippie origins. Cher, Bianca Jagger, and the Italian actress Valentina Cortese were all on Puglisi’s moodboard backstage, looking confident and free. He reproduced Cher’s silvery white criss-cross bandeau top and bell bottoms in black, and Cortese’s signature head scarves, wrapped around the head and worn low over the eyebrows, accessorized some of the other looks. There was no white horse—Jagger famously hopped on one of those at Studio 54 in 1977 wearing a red off-the-shoulder number (Halston, probably)—but you got the feeling that if Puglisi could’ve made it happen, he would have.Renewing a legacy label requires not just a keen appreciation for the past, but also an eye for the future. Puglisi should’ve focused more on the latter in this collection, especially in the first third of the show, much of which was shown in shades of pink and/or was trailing fringe or other surface embellishments. The most modern-looking piece was the closer, a black stretch lace dress embroidered with botanical motifs and dotted with crystals, and featuring a lace-up plunge-front neckline; it was sexy in correct Cavalli fashion, but without any superfluous extras.
20 September 2023
On a resort call, Fausto Puglisi name-checked everyone from Succession’s Shiv Roy to the pop megastars Taylor Swift and Madonna to Michelle Obama, and threw in The White Lotus, to boot, but he kept returning to the Roberto Cavalli POV as a driving force.“When I designed this collection I decided to think like the director of a movie,” he said. “You can have different women as characters, from 15-year-old daughters to their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, and different cultures mixing together, but you can still see the signature of the director.” Puglisi knows his way around the Cavalli signatures: 1970s bell-bottoms, leather craftsmanship, animal print, and what he describes as “that chiffon lightness” were all in the mix here.While the collection dwells in excess, the Puglisi way is to make it all effortlessly approachable. The lineup is mostly separates, many of which are exercises in giving classic shapes the Cavalli touch: There’s a run of trenches in seasonal prints (including a reissued lemon and snake archival artwork); a standout coat in patchworked diagonal pieces of leather, plus a men’s companion jacket; a must-have chocolate brown leather bomber; ruffled cotton skirts in the season’s prints; everyday trousers cut in flared shapes; and Prince of Wales plaid tailoring in beige tones (but with cheetah print lining).Evening wear is where Puglisi flexes his imagination to elevate the house’s visual lexicon. He showed teal devoré zebra and cheetah frocks, easy slip dresses in sequin cheetah, devoré military green velvet that sits with the house’s new palm tree camo, and a silver sequined interpretation of a classic Cavalli print. The black and white cotton lace pieces, while another Cavalli signature, were perhaps one too many stories in this lineup.For menswear, Puglisi harnessed the ease of American sportswear. Silky camp-collar button-downs, printed shorts, wide tailored trousers, dress shirts with a twist (be that placed graphics or black ruffles), and versatile tailoring. His men’s clothes are less complex in silhouette than his womenswear, but they make just as loud of a statement.While some of today’s most iconic stars—Madonna, Lizzo, Miley Cyrus, Doja Cat—have worn his designs, Puglisi has recently been making headlines by creating memorable on-stage outfits for Taylor Swift’s ongoing The Eras Tour.
(The red snake jewelry worn throughout this lookbook may be a Cavalli signature, but it moonlights as a nod to Swift’s Reputation era catsuit with the same motif—the kind of easter egg the performer often leaves behind for her fans to clock.)“It’s always a dialogue,” he said of dressing these megawatt names. “They’re all amazing, they’re all powerful, they know exactly what they want.” He takes the same approach to designing ready-to-wear. Puglisi knows his woman is just as bold as these superstars.
23 May 2023
Fausto Puglisi took a hard right turn toward Old Hollywood razzle-dazzle last season with results that looked like the love children of Edith Head and Tony Duquette. For fall he was back in glamazon mode, channeling Roberto Cavalli at his most Cavalli-esque. We may have been in Milan’s Stock Exchange, but the vibes were hedonistic, with patchwork leather trimmed in crystals, animalia motifs of many kinds, and piles and piles of fur—faux fur, he was quick to clarify, which he made in collaboration with a factory in Japan where they’ve perfected authentic-looking fakes.Denim was another focal point. Jeans are how Cavalli got his start; backstage Puglisi talked about the house founder’s #vanlife early days, when he tooled around Italy scrounging for denim scraps that he collaged into hippie treasures. They were the inspiration for some of the most hands-on, highly embellished pieces Puglisi has made yet at the label. A pair of bell-bottoms were so shredded and shaggy they almost looked like fur too.Beyond the archival references, the mood board was loaded up with early-aughts photos of Kate Moss in black lace and pictures of Georgia O’Keeffe and Millicent Rogers in their high-desert muftis. A 2022 trip through the American Southwest is still reverberating with Puglisi, and he conjured the aesthetic with tooled leather, silver studding, and turquoise beads.Moss’s black lace was reinvented in countless different ways—as a devoré robe with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, sleeves; as a sheer catsuit with feather-trimmed flared legs and another in openwork crochet; and as a sequined lace miniskirt on Abbey Lee, not seen in these parts since beforeMax Max: Fury Road. This collection lived up to Roberto Cavalli’s reputation for excess and then some. All together on the runway, it could feel like information overload, but backstage Puglisi shrugged it off. “It’s just a bunch of separates,” he said, and he made the point when he showed a studded and beaded leather motorcycle jacket on both a man and a woman.
22 February 2023
Fausto Puglisi isn’t hemmed in by the Roberto Cavalli codes. Proof of that this pre-season comes from his muses Millicent Rogers and Georgia O’Keeffe. Neither were the glamazon type. Rogers was an oil heiress who turned to the fight for Native American civil rights later in life, and O’Keeffe, of course, was an artist. New Mexico is the link between them; both women called it home.An enthusiastic Americanophile, Puglisi made a pilgrimage to the southwest earlier this year. Its turquoise jewelry accessorizes many of his pre-fall looks, and he used the veined blue stone to inspire the vivid color of floaty chiffon dresses.That said, there are many pieces here that you’d never not guess are Cavalli. The requisite leopard spot slip dresses and zebra stripe capes are present and correct, as is a photo print of fur, and the cut-out numbers that Jennifer Lopez has adopted as a red carpet uniform also turned up in multiples. They “sell like bread here in the US,” Puglisi said at a New York preview. He’d spent the previous few days at Art Basel Miami, where the evil pinup print shirt from the men’s collection he wore (she’s got devil horns) received many approving inquiries.So the surprise is how Puglisi gamely keeps expanding the Cavalli aesthetic. Pre-fall has a tiered and ruffled plaid dress that almost qualifies as folksy, a brown corduroy skirt suit, other sharply tailored pieces in Prince of Wales checks, and double-face cashmere coats that Rogers would’ve found useful in her pre-New Mexico days as a New York socialite. He said the fall collection he’ll show on the runway in February will continue to push into new territory.
5 December 2022
Fausto Puglisi isn’t hemmed in by the Roberto Cavalli codes. Proof of that this pre-season comes from his muses Millicent Rogers and Georgia O’Keeffe. Neither were the glamazon type. Rogers was an oil heiress who turned to the fight for Native American civil rights later in life, and O’Keeffe, of course, was an artist. New Mexico is the link between them; both women called it home.An enthusiastic Americanophile, Puglisi made a pilgrimage to the southwest earlier this year. Its turquoise jewelry accessorizes many of his pre-fall looks, and he used the veined blue stone to inspire the vivid color of floaty chiffon dresses.That said, there are many pieces here that you’d never not guess are Cavalli. The requisite leopard spot slip dresses and zebra stripe capes are present and correct, as is a photo print of fur, and the cut-out numbers that Jennifer Lopez has adopted as a red carpet uniform also turned up in multiples. They “sell like bread here in the US,” Puglisi said at a New York preview. He’d spent the previous few days at Art Basel Miami, where the evil pinup print shirt from the men’s collection he wore (she’s got devil horns) received many approving inquiries.So the surprise is how Puglisi gamely keeps expanding the Cavalli aesthetic. Pre-fall has a tiered and ruffled plaid dress that almost qualifies as folksy, a brown corduroy skirt suit, other sharply tailored pieces in Prince of Wales checks, and double-face cashmere coats that Rogers would’ve found useful in her pre-New Mexico days as a New York socialite. He said the fall collection he’ll show on the runway in February will continue to push into new territory.
5 December 2022