Roberto Cavalli, the Italian clothier who celebrated glamour and extra, sending fashions down the runway and actresses onto pink carpets sporting leopard-print attire, bejeweled distressed denims, satin corsets and different unapologetically flashy garments, has died. He was 83.
His firm introduced the dying on Instagram however supplied no particulars.
Mr. Cavalli’s signature fashion — “molto horny, molto animal print and molto, molto Italiano,” because the British newspaper The Unbiased as soon as described it — remained primarily unchanged all through his lengthy profession. However he skillfully reinvented his garments for various eras, having fun with a number of renaissances and constructing a worldwide way of life model within the course of.
Within the Nineteen Seventies, Mr. Cavalli designed jackets, denims and minidresses produced from patchwork denim, promoting his upscale hippie frocks in a boutique in St. Tropez, on the French Riviera, to actresses like Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren.
For the subsequent twenty years, he remained largely unknown outdoors Europe. Then, within the Nineties, he reinvented luxurious denim, first with the sandblasted look after which, in a stroke of invention, by placing Lycra in denims to make them match extra snugly and look sexier. When the mannequin Naomi Campbell wore a pair throughout a runway present in 1993, stretch denims grew to become an enormous development.
Earlier than that breakthrough, Mr. Cavalli’s enterprise was floundering, and he had thought-about closing his manufacturing facility. However from the mid-’90s onward, he was one of many largest names in style, with shops all over the world, movie star admirers like Lenny Kravitz and Cindy Crawford and licenses for all the pieces from jewellery, fragrance and sun shades to youngsters’s garments, housewares and a Roberto Cavalli-branded vodka, which got here packaged in a snakeskin-covered bottle.
Like (Gianni) Versace or Calvin (Klein), Cavalli achieved single-name standing: He stood for an instantly recognizable aesthetic.
“Roberto cherished extra, however he by no means misplaced his standpoint,” Nina Garcia, the editor in chief of Elle journal, mentioned in an e-mail in 2020. “Even when minimalism was the norm, he believed in maximalism. He dressed us pondering that life — and style — ought to be lived at full velocity.”
A full obituary will comply with.
