Italian Fashion Designer Roberto Cavalli Has Died at 83

Roberto Cavalli, the Italian designer who imbued the printed-LED boho look with sex appeal, has died at the age of 83. His death was confirmed by the brand. “The Roberto Cavalli company shares its condolences with Mr. Cavalli’s family. His legacy remains a constant source of inspiration,” said Sergio Azzolari, CEO of Roberto Cavalli.

By the time shows started going digital (circa 2000), Cavalli was an established golden name in fashion; an older one even, enjoying a second round of fame. He gave off Hefner vibes (without the cloak) when he smoked a pipe in the fall of 2001. (The designer was even asked to redesign the Playboy bunny costume in 2005.) By then, the Leonine Cavalli was living the good life, something he achieved through braggadocio and brainpower—and against the odds. In the context of Cacvalli’s life story, the body worship and frank sexiness of his work can be seen more broadly as an affirmation of life itself, which he recognized from an early age was fragile.

Cavalli’s maternal grandfather, born in Florence in 1940, was a member of the Macchiaioli group of Italian Impressionists. His father, an anti-fascist who is believed to have been a mine explorer, was shot by Nazi forces when Cavalli was just three years old. The psychological impact was expressed physically through stuttering. “It wasn’t easy for me to talk, the shock,” the designer told Luke Leitch in 2011 interview. To support the family, his mother took up sewing at home and hired seamstresses to help her. At the age of 17, a confident Cavalli enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Florence to study art and architecture. There he met and fell in love with his first wife and the mother of two of his children, Silvanella Giannoni.

In 1960, after hand-painting some sweaters for a friend in the knitwear business, Cavalli was encouraged to do something his own with fairly traditional floral prints, and began applying them to existing garments. It wasn’t long before the designer Leitch wrote in a 2011 article Panorama, “had graduated from learning textile printing techniques on a borrowed ping-pong table, to working on his own six-foot-long printing table (bought by his mother) in a rented garage, to building his first factory,” with some financing from a friend. That factory was flooded in November 1966, not long before the Summer of Love, which Cavalli would continue indefinitely in fashion and his personal life.

The designer’s next breakthrough came when he tried to make good on a lie he used while chasing girls. Cavalli told the following anecdote Panorama interview. In September 1970, the young divorcee crashed a party at the home of leather designer Mario Valentino. In an attempt to impress a beautiful woman who had asked what he did, Cavalli replied that he made prints on leather. She then introduced him to the host, who asked to see them. The designer took up the challenge by applying his printing technique to the thinnest glove leather. (Hippie flowers in a dusty Cacharel palette were all the rage at the time.) Valentino wasn’t the only one impressed; Hermès wanted to acquire exclusive rights to the technology. “I was flying back from Paris and on that plane I was thinking. I thought: ‘Maybe if I design one collection now, I could meet a lot of models! That was always a principle in my life!’ the designer told Leitch.