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Daily Fashion & Runway News
Jan 21, 2010
With Roberto Cavalli, Patty Pravo, and Sofia Milos.
Feb 15, 2009
With Padma Lakshmi, Amy Sacco and Grace Coddington.
Since its first show in 1970 at the Salon for Prêt-à-Porter in Paris, Florence-born Roberto Cavalli has been synonymous with glam, rock, and animal prints. His flamboyant Italian style caught on quickly, and by 1972 he opened his first boutique in Saint-Tropez, a perfect French Riviera resort location to sell his signature patchworks of different materials (a printing-on-leather procedure he patented in the early seventies). The decadent life of the designer—summers on yachts, gold on everything—translates into the label, which people go to for a taste of the over-the-top Italian lifestyle. So look to Cavalli for color, and lots of it. A genius when it comes to leather, his designs are wild, sexy, erotic, and fluid. To date, Cavalli has done it all—from menswear, to womenswear, to children's clothing, to a secondary line named Just Cavalli, to designs for the home. Though he was looking for buyers of the business in 2008, no one ever took on the Cavalli kingdom, so he kept at himself—and in December he launched a nightclub, a fitting business venture for the man who designs clothes club girls love to wear.
“There is an artistic bent to what he does, and that's the difference -- the wonderful craft that's in his clothes. In a world where too many people were designing the same thing and almost every collection looks alike, Cavalli's prints are different, seductive.”—Joan Kaner, Former Fashion Director at Neiman Marcus The New York Times
“He is the anti-Calvin, eschewing Mr. Klein's uniform of T-shirts and khakis, for the tight jeans, gold chains and aviator frames he long ago adopted as the badge of unregenerate hedonism. Let his competitors hide behind their labels, dispensing temperate sound bites through a cadre of public relations people. Mr. Cavalli likes to speak his mind.”—Ruth LaFurla The New York Times
“He calls his stunningly overt, brazenly sexy craftsmanship ‘rock haute couture.' One can't walk in his lizard pants. One has to slither. Skirts are stamped with the gold-leaf embossing usually worked into opera curtains. Laser cutting transforms calfskin into lace, rhinestones miraculously suspended in each opening. And his jeans are unbelievable: shredded to reveal inner layers of brocade, inset with laser-cut lace birds. Nudists in Amish country couldn't attract more attention.”—Hal Rubenstein InStyle
Roberto Cavalli