Roberto Cavalli, the fashion designer who celebrated excess, dies at 83

Roberto Cavalli, the Italian fashion designer who celebrated glamor and excess, sending models and actresses onto red carpets wearing leopard-print dresses, bejeweled distressed jeans, satin corsets and other clothing unapologetically flashy, died. He was 83 years old.

His company announced the death on Instagram but provided no details.

Mr. Cavalli's signature style, molto sexy, molto animal print and molto, molto Italiano, as described by the British newspaper The Independent, has remained essentially unchanged throughout his long career. But he has skillfully reinvented his clothes for different eras, enjoying several renaissances and building a global lifestyle brand in the process.

In the 1970s, Mr. Cavalli created patchwork denim jackets, jeans and minidresses, selling his high-end products. hippie dresses in a boutique in Saint-Tropez, on the Côte d'Azur, to actresses like Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren.

For the next two decades he remained largely unknown outside of Europe. Then, in the 1990s, he reinvented luxury denim, first with the sandblasted look and then, in a stroke of invention, by putting Lycra in jeans to make them more fitted and sexier. When model Naomi Campbell wore a pair on a runway show in 1993, stretch jeans became a big trend.

Before this breakthrough, Mr. Cavalli's business was struggling and he had considered closing his factory. But by the mid-'90s, he was one of the biggest names in fashion, with stores around the world, celebrity admirers like Lenny Kravitz and Cindy Crawford, and licenses for everything from jewelry to perfume. and sunglasses to children's clothing, housewares and a Roberto. Cavalli brand vodka, packaged in a snakeskin-covered bottle.

Like (Gianni) Versace or Calvin (Klein), Cavalli achieved unique name status: he represented an instantly recognizable aesthetic.

Roberto loved excess, but he never lost his point of view, Nina Garcia, editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, said in an email in 2020. Even when minimalism was the norm, he believed in maximalism. He dressed us thinking that life and fashion should be lived at full speed.

Mr. Cavalli's eye-catching, bare-bones clothes were not for introverts. Nor was his brand intellectual. Rather, Mr. Cavalli played to the fun, flamboyant and hedonistic side of fashion. A Cavalli outfit caught the eye.

Peter Dundas, who served as the brand's head designer and then creative director before leaving in 2016 to start his own brand, said in an interview that Cavalli was for the pop star in everyone.

Mr. Cavalli has also dressed real pop stars. Among them were Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera, Shakira and the Spice Girls, for whom he designed outfits for their reunion tour in 2007. Two years earlier, Playboy hired him to revamp the bunny costume.

Lenny Kravitz was another customer, a man confident enough to wear tight leather pants. I'm a big fan of the way Miles Davis dressed, in skins, prints and leather, with urban class and a street, yet elegant, Mr. Kravitz vibe. said Vanity Fair in a 2009 profile of Mr. Cavalli. Roberto has this.

Permanently tanned and always smoking a cigar, Mr. Cavalli led a lifestyle as rock n roll as his clothes. He piloted his own iridescent purple helicopter, sailed the Mediterranean aboard a matching purple yacht, and lived with his family in a scrappy old farmhouse outside Florence, Italy, where he maintained a menagerie of parrots , dogs, Persian cats and a pet monkey. He met Eva Duranter, who would become his second wife and business partner, when he was a judge in the 1977 Miss Universe pageant and she was Miss Austria.

But if Mr. Cavalli was a clever marketer who created an aura of luxury around his brand and personality, he was also a master craftsman who invented new ways to print, dye and manipulate fabrics. And it mixes materials, colors, patterns and prints with enviable style.

As he told Womens Wear Daily in 2013, I want to make it clear that behind the fabulous yacht, the champagne, the parties, there is a man called Roberto Cavalli, who worked very, very hard to create this wonderful life .

Roberto Cavalli was born on November 15, 1940, in the suburbs of Florence, to Giorgio and Marcella (Rossi) Cavalli. His father was a surveyor for a mining company, his mother a seamstress who managed the house.

His childhood was marked by tragedy: in 1944, in retaliation for an attack by Italian resistance soldiers, the German army rounded up a group of local men, including Giorgio Cavalli, and shot them dead.

Roberto developed a stutter from the shock of his father's death and became a rebellious teenager. He did not find his purpose until he attended the Istituto d'Arte, an art school in Florence, starting in 1957. (His grandfather, Giuseppe Rossi, was a highly regarded painter .)

Through his training, Mr. Cavalli learned to print designs on T-shirts and sweaters, and throughout the 1960s he sold to clients like Hermès. In 1970, he invented and patented a printing technique on light leather and suede; the same year, he decided to present his first collection (including evening dresses and leather swimsuits) at the annual Salon du Prêt-Porter in Paris.

People like it, but no one is buying it, Mr. Cavalli told Vanity Fair. Because it was too new, too unusual.

He had more success with denim. He bought a container of old jeans from an American prison, washed them, then cut and sewed them with pieces of leather to create a patchwork. Her ornate, handcrafted, bohemian-chic clothes were perfectly in tune with the rich hippie aesthetic of the early 1970s, when rock musicians wore Nudie suits and East West Leather jackets and their fans embroidered their bluejeans.

Mr. Cavalli's baroque clothes fell out of favor in the 1980s, when designers like Calvin Klein and Rei Kawakubo sparked a trend toward minimalism. He spent the decade in fashion's no-mans land, and he seemed to resent simplicity itself.

I like fashion that is different, minimalism is boring, it said an audience at a conference at Oxford University in 2013. I am a mountain in minimalism.

As the 2000s dawned and fashion globalized, Mr. Cavalli was back on top. He opened his first boutique in the United States in 1999, and by 2010 his fashion house operated 60 boutiques around the world. Stylists vied to get their hands on her designs for their celebrity clients, while Carrie Bradshaw, the fictional heroine of Sex and the City, wore giraffe-spotted Cavalli dresses and peony-patterned jeans. Her wild clothes and dolce vita image seemed to represent the energy and excitement of the new millennium, with its society tabloids, Real Housewives, multiple award shows and easy travel around the world.

As Ms. Garcia said: “He defined the era of unrepentant maximalism.”

Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Cavalli has had his critics. As was the case with Mr. Versace before him (although he actually predated the advent of designers), his clothes were characterized as vulgar, tart and unsubtle. This is a man for whom zebra print is neutral, wrote the New York Times.

In 2019, after years of high-flying expansion, Mr. Cavalli was going through another period of downturn, as was the industry as a whole. His fashion house closed its stores in the United States and filed for bankruptcy protection that year. Zebra prints weren't in sync with the casual athleisure era.

But Mr. Cavalli was not one to change his uniform. For five decades, he consistently fulfilled this most necessary role in fashion, creating clothes that gave those who wore them the confidence to be the star of their own lives.

In his speech at Oxford, Mr. Cavalli summed up his personal philosophy thus: Fashion that is not crazy is not fashion.