Roberto Cavalli, the Italian designer who made his mark on the style world with distinctive, glamourous animal prints, has died on the age of 83. His eponymous model confirmed the information in an announcement shared on social media Friday afternoon, highlighting Cavalli’s “life lived with love.”
“Roberto Cavalli’s legacy will stay on through his creativity,” the assertion continued, “his love of nature and through his household who he cherished.”
Cavalli was born in Florence in 1940. His grandfather, Giuseppe Rossi, was a famend painter; Cavalli adopted in his footsteps by enrolling at Florence’s Academy of Artwork, the place he began experimenting with portray, patchwork and textiles.
Over time he developed an revolutionary leather-based printing approach, which earned him commissions from Hermès and Pierre Cardin, and set him on a inventive path constructed upon an ostentatiously flamboyant aesthetic.
“Trend is a part of our life. Once you get up within the morning you say, “What do I’ve to put on to look lovely, improbable, horny, particular?”’ Cavalli informed CNN in a 2008 interview. “That’s the reason I really like being a designer as a result of I can use it to measure your temper, your life.”
He introduced his first namesake assortment in Paris in 1970, earlier than debuting on the catwalks in Florence and Milan, in 1972. That very same yr, he opened his first boutique in Saint-Tropez, the seaside French city that might turn out to be a global image of glamour and luxurious.
In 1980, Cavalli married Austrian mannequin and sweetness queen Eva Maria Düringer, who joined his enterprise as inventive director. (Cavalli had served as a choose on the 1977 Miss Universe pageant, the place Düringer competed as Miss Austria.) The pair had three kids — Cavalli already had two from his first marriage — and remained collectively for 3 many years. He welcomed a sixth little one together with his accomplice Sandra Nilsson in 2023.
Within the mid-Nineties, Cavalli revolutionized the world of denim with a variety of improvements, amongst them stretch denims, which he invented by including Lycra to the material, and a course of for sand-blasting denim items that gave them a lived-in impact. Together with animal prints and intarsia leather-based, denim grew to become a core ingredient of his signature model, resulting in the institution of a younger offshoot model, Simply Cavalli, in 1998.
At an Oxford College discuss in 2013, Cavalli defined his ardour for wild animal patterns, which he used on every thing from denim to pink carpet robes: “I really like nature. Animals have the perfect clothes. God made them so well-dressed. Girls like these designs, they really feel pure in them,” he mentioned. (He had sponsored a 2004 exhibition on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York, titled “WILD: Trend Untamed,” which the museum described as showcasing “man’s obsession with animalism as expressed by clothes.”)
Within the 2000s, Cavalli opened his first cafe-store in Florence and the Simply Cavalli membership in Milan, which grew to become a beacon of the town’s famed nightlife. He was among the many first designers, in 2007, to launch a high-street assortment, with H&M, in addition to increasing into homewares and interiors. Amongst extra diversified ventures nonetheless, he launched a vodka model within the US in 2005.
Cavalli retired from lively obligation at his label in 2015, choosing the designer Peter Dundas to succeed him as inventive director. Dundas left the job after solely three seasons and was succeeded by Paul Surridge, who remained till 2019. In the identical yr, after a interval of monetary difficulties that led to chapter, the enterprise was acquired by a Dubai-based non-public funding agency, which has since retained the designer Fausto Puglisi for its style collections and additional branched out into Cavalli-branded actual property and hospitality ventures.
Puglisi paid tribute to the designer within the caption of the label’s Instagram publish.
“Expensive Roberto, you will not be bodily right here with us anymore however I do know I’ll really feel your spirit with me at all times. It’s the biggest honour of my profession to work underneath your legacy and to create for the model you based with such imaginative and prescient and elegance. Relaxation in peace you may be missed and you might be liked by so many who your title will proceed on, a beacon of inspiration for others, and particularly for me,” Puglisi mentioned.
