Remembering Roberto Cavalli, ‘King of Bling’

They didn’t name him the “king of glitz” for nothing.

There was nothing refined about Roberto Cavalli, the designer recognized for his maximalism and over-the-top animal prints, not on his runways and definitely not in his private life, which was splashed everywhere in the Italian tabloids each time he went to the seashore in a tiny bathing swimsuit or fathered one other little one, which was with some frequency in his later years. Cavalli, who died in Florence on Friday on the age of 83, was a larger-than-life character who constructed a style empire primarily based on his personal picture, an image of Italian swagger, which he referred to as the “Cavalli World.”

From his fifteenth century farmhouse exterior Florence, Cavalli commanded 40 acres of Tuscan hillside populated with hundreds of olive and cypress bushes, sprawling gardens, swimming swimming pools, a Turkish bathtub, an armada of racing vehicles (together with a 1970 Ferrari Daytona) and a large storage constructed for his custom-designed, iridescent-painted helicopter, which he piloted himself for his each day commute to work. His elaborately carved mattress body was a prop from a runway present impressed by Marchesa Luisa Casati. Many of the furnishings was upholstered in materials from previous collections that includes animal prints not present in nature. Reside animals, too, had been all over the place: squawking cockatoos, a big German shepherd, two tiny Yorkshire terriers and, as soon as upon a time, a noticed Savannah cat named Cialis.

The surplus of his environment, he usually advised guests whereas chomping on a cigar, was a tribute to his success: annual gross sales at Roberto Cavalli — which supplied the whole lot from ready-to-wear to equipment, watches, jewelry, perfume, eyewear and underwear — peaked round $250 million in 2014, the yr earlier than the designer bought a majority curiosity in his enterprise. Befitting his decadent way of life, he additionally designed nightclubs and mega-yachts and had his personal model of vodka. For a lot of the 2000s and into the subsequent decade, Cavalli’s outré designs turned purple carpet staples, his body-baring tropical clothes worn by the likes of Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez. However his firm was additionally tormented by operational and administration points that had been by no means absolutely resolved underneath a collection of householders and new designers as soon as Cavalli retired.

Cavalli himself appeared to recognise that his cultural impression was very a lot tied to a second when intercourse bought. Though he started designing within the Nineteen Sixties after his research on the Artwork Institute of Florence, Cavalli — whose grandfather Giuseppe Rossi’s work are exhibited within the Uffizi Gallery — struggled to search out an viewers for years. When he began the Roberto Cavalli firm in 1970, already promoting vividly printed boho fashions, even printed leather-based, nobody was shopping for his look. It wasn’t till the breakthrough of Gianni Versace within the Nineteen Nineties that minimalism started to fade, leaving house for the extra provocative model favoured by the younger Italians.

“Earlier than that, the whole lot was flat in style,” Cavalli mentioned in 2001, when he had develop into the go-to designer for movie star flash. “It was like fragrance or cleaning soap in that the whole lot was the identical. Glasses had been regular. Watches had been regular. There was a flattening in creativity, however I introduced one thing totally different.”

Through the “Intercourse and the Metropolis” years, Cavalli turned as a lot of a star as the ladies he dressed, opening shops all over the world. Courtney Love and Lenny Kravitz promoted his work, and Cavalli latched onto the Hollywood set, befriending producers and administrators and alluring them to benefit from the spoils of his villa. (Anthony Hopkins got here by to make use of the gymnasium virtually each day throughout the filming of “Hannibal.”) In 2003, he served because the grand marshal of New York’s Columbus Day parade, blowing kisses to strangers on Fifth Avenue from a teal Alfa Romeo Spider convertible, surrounded by an entourage of 20 fashions using Ducati bikes.

“The movie star connection is essential,” Cavalli mentioned. “It’s extra vital to me personally than to anybody else as a result of it makes me really feel vital… It’s vital as a result of it’s adrenaline, and that’s what begins creativity.” By 2014, the corporate had 179 shops for his signature model and the denim-focused diffusion label, Simply Cavalli, which accelerated the model’s worldwide progress but additionally brought on the enterprise to lose cash for years because it confronted problems with its licensees. As with the whole lot Cavalli, the surplus generally turned an excessive amount of, as critics sniped over the more and more loudness of his garments. His 2007 collaboration with H&M, which included leopard tights and sheer briefs, was panned for its cartoonish intercourse enchantment.

After Cavalli bought a majority stake within the firm to Clessidra, a personal fairness fund, in 2015, Peter Dundas took over the model’s artistic path, solely to get replaced two years later by Paul Surridge, who himself left the home in 2017. After a chapter in 2019 that noticed the closure of the model’s shops and operations in the US, Cavalli was bought to the Dubai luxurious actual property developer Hussain Sajwani, who named Fausto Puglisi artistic director in 2020. “It’s the biggest honour of my profession to work underneath your legacy and to create for you the model you based with such imaginative and prescient and elegance,” Puglisi mentioned on Instagram.

Cavalli’s private life was the topic of a lot public fascination, too. He met his second spouse, Eva Duringer, throughout the Miss Universe pageant in 1977, when he was a choose and he or she was Miss Austria. Eva Cavalli was his design accomplice for a few years and collectively that they had three kids. The couple continued working and dwelling collectively after ending their marriage round 2010. Final yr, at 82, Cavalli had a son, his sixth little one, with Sandra Nilsson, a former Swedish mannequin. Cavalli had a way of humour about himself and infrequently poked enjoyable at his personal narcissism, which was not all the time politically appropriate. He collected uncommon animals and objects with the identical sense of abandon that he designed his prints, even on the threat of inflicting offence.

“I keep in mind initially, a few of my associates mentioned, ‘Oh Roberto, you utilize too many sorts of ornament,’” he mentioned. “What do they care what I put in my home? I select items that remind me of my life.”