Roberto Cavalli, the Italian designer who made a reputation for himself because the couturier to the rock ‘n roll St. Tropez set and who died this week at age 83, lived as he designed: in his personal Wild Kingdom of parrots, Persian cats, monkeys, racehorses and diverse toys (Ferraris, a helicopter). He based his personal model in 1970 and virtually from the start cherished zebra, giraffe, leopard and lynx; tiger stripes and leopard spots, and put them not simply on the runway however on his poolside loungers and bike seats — usually all on the similar time.
His animal prints didn’t at all times originate from nature however from his personal creativeness, chimeras of unique skins that telegraphed extra, intercourse and aspiration. He roamed additional afield, in fact — into lace, sequins, studs and denim — nevertheless it was his love of an over-the-top sartorial menagerie that made his identify. If Gianni Versace was the id of Italian vogue, Mr. Cavalli made it roar, hitting mass saturation within the late nineties as an antidote to the minimalism of Jil Sander and Helmut Lang.
He stepped into the vacuum created by the homicide of Mr. Versace in 1997, was additional buoyed by the frothy inventory market, and shortly, Paris Hilton was sporting him. So was Candace Bushnell, creator of “Intercourse and the Metropolis.” Victoria Beckham was a fan throughout her Posh Spice period. Little surprise he was the primary sponsor of the 2004 present on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork’s Costume Institute: “Wild: Vogue Untamed” — or that Ben Stiller wore Mr. Cavalli’s designs for “Zoolander,” Mr. Stiller’s vogue satire.
PETA would have been horrified (protestors crashed a present in 2005), and the most important vogue magazines held their noses a little bit, however celebrities flocked like migrating birds in his brightly branded plumage to Mr. Cavalli’s reveals and modernist property exterior Florence. There he performed host to all of them, lord of the leopard print jungle.
