EGN NEWS DESK
Roberto Cavalli, the Italian designer who celebrated glamour and extra, sending fashions down the runway and actresses onto pink carpets sporting leopard-print clothes, bejeweled distressed denims, satin corsets and different unapologetically flashy garments, has died. He was 83.
His firm introduced the demise on Instagram however offered no particulars.
Mr. Cavalli’s signature type — “molto horny, molto animal print and molto, molto Italiano,” because the British newspaper The Independent as soon as described it — remained basically unchanged all through his lengthy profession. But 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.
In the Nineteen Seventies, Mr. Cavalli designed jackets, denims and minidresses constructed 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 20 years, he remained largely unknown outdoors Europe. Then, within the Nineteen 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 turned an enormous development.
Before that breakthrough, Mr. Cavalli’s enterprise was floundering, and he had thought-about closing his manufacturing unit. But from the mid-’90s onward, he was one of many greatest names in vogue, with shops world wide, movie star admirers like Lenny Kravitz and Cindy Crawford and licenses for all the things from jewellery, fragrance and sun shades to kids’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 liked extra, however he by no means misplaced his viewpoint,” Nina Garcia, the editor in chief of Elle journal, stated in an e-mail in 2020. “Even when minimalism was the norm, he believed in maximalism. He dressed us pondering that life — and vogue — needs to be lived at full pace.”
A full obituary will observe.
