Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli, known for a flamboyant and glamorous style, has died at age 83, his company said Friday on Instagram.
Roberto Cavalli, the Italian fashion designer known for his unique, colorful animal patterns, died at the age of 83. His namesake brand confirmed the news in a statement posted on social media Friday afternoon, emphasizing Cavalli’s “life lived with love.”
“Roberto Cavalli’s legacy will live on via his creativity,” the press release went on to say, “his love of nature, and via his family, whom he cherished.”
Roberto Cavalli was born in Florence, Italy, in 1940. His grandpa, Giuseppe Rossi, was a well-known painter; Cavalli followed in his footsteps and enrolled at Florence’s Academy of Art, where he began experimenting with painting, patchwork, and textiles.
Over time, he created an inventive leather printing process that garnered him orders from Hermès and Pierre Cardin, launching him on a creative path marked by an ostentatiously flamboyant style.
“Fashion is a part of our lives. When you get up in the morning, you say, “What do I have to wear to look beautiful, fantastic, sexy, or special?” Cavalli told CNN in an interview from 2008. “That is the reason I love being a fashion designer: I can use it to measure your mood and your life.”
In 1970, he exhibited his first named collection in Paris, followed by catwalk appearances in Florence and Milan in 1972. That same year, he established his first shop in Saint-Tropez, a beachfront French resort that would become a global icon of elegance and luxury.
Roberto Cavalli married Austrian model and beauty queen Eva Maria Düringer in 1980, and she later became his creative director. (Cavalli judged the 1977 Miss Universe pageant, when Düringer competed as Miss Austria.) The couple had three children — Cavalli already had two from his first marriage — and stayed together for three decades. He and his partner, Sandra Nilsson, had their sixth child in 2023.
Roberto Cavalli revolutionized the denim industry in the mid-1990s with a series of inventions, including stretch jeans, which he devised by adding Lycra to the fabric, and a sand-blasting method that gave denim items a worn-in appearance.
Along with animal designs and intarsia leather, denim became a key component of his hallmark style, prompting the launch of a more young spinoff brand, Just Roberto Cavalli, in 1998.
At an Oxford University presentation in 2013, Cavalli highlighted his love of wild animal motifs, which he utilized on everything from jeans to red carpet gowns: “I adore nature. Animals are the best dressed. God made them so well-dressed. “Women like these designs because they feel natural in them,” he explained. (In 2004, he funded “WILD: Fashion Untamed,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that showcased “man’s obsession with animalism as expressed through clothing.”
In the 2000s, Roberto Cavalli launched his first cafe-store in Florence and the Just Cavalli club in Milan, which became a symbol of the city’s renowned nightlife. In 2007, he was one of the first designers to debut a high-street line with H&M while also expanding into homewares and interiors. Among his more diverse businesses, he created a vodka brand in the United States in 2005.
Roberto Cavalli quit active duties at his business in 2015, and designer Peter Dundas succeeded him as creative director. Dundas resigned after only three seasons and was replaced by Paul Surridge, who stayed until 2019.
Following a period of financial difficulties that led to bankruptcy, the company was purchased by a Dubai-based private investment firm, which has since retained designer Fausto Puglisi for its fashion collections and expanded into Cavalli-branded real estate and hospitality ventures.
Puglisi praised the designer in the description of the label’s Instagram photo.
“Dear Roberto, you may not be physically with us longer, but I know your spirit will always be with me. Puglisi commented, “It is the greatest honour of my career to work under your legacy and create for the brand you founded with such vision and style.”
“Rest in peace; you will be missed, and you are loved by so many that your name will continue to be a beacon of inspiration for others, especially for me.”
