He has made animal prints his most distinctive signature: the world of fashion says goodbye to Roberto Cavallithe historic designer and founder of his eponymous fashion house, who died today to 83 years old, after a long illness. Next to him in the last hours, as in the last fifteen years, his partner Sandra Bergman Nilsonn. She leaves behind six children, the last Giorgio – named after his father, killed by the Nazis in 1944 – was born in March 2023. “I was two years old,” the designer said. “I didn't speak until I was 18. But life was generous to me, it rewarded me for everything.”
Born on November 15, 1940 in Florence, Cavalli approached the world of art as a child thanks to his grandfather Giuseppe Rossi's passion: painting. The latter, a well-known Macchiaiolo who exhibited his paintings at the Uffizi museum in Florence, would later inspire that artistic research which has then constantly characterized his nephew's stylistic work. Roberto Cavalli in fact attended the Academy of Fine Arts, and then later approached avant-garde technologies that he would adopt for the creation of his clothes. First of all a specific type of printing on leather, which he patented in the 1960s and which allowed him to attract the attention, as well as the curiosity, of large fashion houses such as Hermès and Pierre Cardin.
Roberto Cavalli was born in Florence on 15 November 1940. He is the nephew of the painter Giuseppe Rossi, whose works are exhibited in the Uffizi Gallery. His father was shot by the German Nazis in 1944, so Roberto grew up alone with his mother. After the war, at school he showed great passion for …
At thirty, the big leap: to his first collection presented in Paris in 1970, followed by a fashion show in the historic Sala Bianca of Palazzo Pitti in Florence, and then opened his first single-brand boutique in Saint-Tropez in 1972. First abroad, then Italy: after the boutique in Saint Barth, in the Caribbean, the first Italian opening came in Venice in 1996. Only in October 2000 he then inaugurated his first boutique in Milan. However, the new millennium did not only mark the Milanese debut in Via della Spiga: in the same year Roberto Cavalli launched the children's line and the Just Cavalli brand, both in 2000.
Going back in time again, we are in 1980: this is the year in which Roberto Cavalli gets married for the second time (after ten years of marriage to Silvanella Giannoni) with the model Eva Düringerwho achieved fame by winning the beauty pageant in 1977 Miss Austria and coming second in Miss Universe in the same year. Her life partner, but also her business partner: after her marriage, Eva Düringer leaves her career as a model to become her husband's trusted collaborator.
Roberto Cavalli deserves the credit for making women felinedefining female sensuality through prints and patterns inspired by the animal and wild world. Precisely those that gave him, in 2010, the title of “king of animalier” by The New York Times. Revered by great celebrities such as Naomi Campbell, Taylor Swift and Heidi Klum, Roberto Cavalli's work has also been a great inspiration his approach to denima material revolutionized as early as 1993 by introducing processing techniques that gave it a lived-in effect while maintaining its status as a luxury product.
Inventor of the iconic Balestra Blue colour, the designer embarked on a career in the world of fashion due to a fortuitous circumstance. His haute couture creations, also loved by Hollywood stars, have made him a protagonist of Italian high fashion in the world
Roberto Cavalli's stylistic legacy continues: his fashion house is directed today by Fausto Puglisi, the designer from Messina who was appointed to take over the creative reins of the brand in October 2020. Before him, the fashion house also included the stylistic features of Yvan Mispelaere, Peter Dundas and Paul Surridge. A succession of authoritative names which only with Fausto Puglisi would seem to have brought the brand to a newfound stability in perception and aesthetics: always and only in the unique and irreplaceable sign of the iconic prints of the “king of animalier”.
Source: Vanity Fair
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