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Where to start to remember Roberto Cavalli? «I am the party» he answered in the affirmative to those who asked «Where is the party?» in the commercial for the launch of the collaboration with H&M. It was 2007, he was one of the first to imagine sensational but low-priced clothes for the Swedish fast fashion giant. Unforgettable, in a show from a few years earlier, was an embroidered blue sheath dress, like a Ming vase to wear: an elementary but very effective idea. Not to mention the printed shirts that he had created, as a pioneer, for Anna Molinari, and the jeans treated in every way and manner.
Roberto Cavalli, a story in images
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Legendary, again, a fashion show set in Mariano Fortuny’s studio and populated with decadent divines of the Marchesa Casati variety. Fortuny is an apt comparison, mutatis mutandis and without wild and excessive aesthetics: Roberto Cavalli, nephew of the Macchiaiolo painter Giuseppe Rossi, applied a pictorial sensitivity to the material while imagining clothes full of sensuality. He was free and unruly, and so was his fashion which saw its apogee in the 2000s, breaking the barrier of good taste with a proud bling bling.
As a truly free spirit, he has always cultivated, metaphorically, his garden, doing what he liked without the desire to conquer the world which is a general frenzy today. He created an aesthetic, which survives him and is part of history. Without him, the fashion party is no longer the same.