ROBERTO CAVALLI Women’s Collection Fall/Winter 2023-2024
She’s wild
Don’t ask Fausto Puglisi to explain the fierce conjunctions that happen in his head as he gets down to work at Roberto Cavalli. Even at their more outlandish, even at the furthest stretch, they always make sense. That’s the magic of the Roberto Cavalli world, the place Fausto inhabits: a boundless land ruled by unbridled invention. This season Fausto brings the Cavalli woman on a very Cavalli trip to the American Southwest, keeping her trademark liberated spirit, her sensual way of luxuriating in decoration, while following Millicent Rogers and Georgia O’Keefe as muses du moment, and beyond. What an unlikely couple: one exuberant to the point of eccentricity, the other severe and spare in her habit. That’s the kind of friction Fausto loves. These women of widely different personalities, however, have more similarities one would expect: they both ended up in ranches in New Mexico, and they both used dress as a continuation and integral part or their way of being and expressing themselves. The Cavalli woman does the same. Brought in contact with the glaring sun and the elemental life in the West, she gets possibly wilder. She uses turquoise stones aplenty, even just as a button on the blazers, and favors faux fur as her cover up. The thing looks more furry than real fur but is completely man-made. She’s wild, not cruel. The warm and earthy palette of rust, browns, denim blues and blacks accented with a note of pink sets the tone, the focus being on an elongated silhouette that skims the body and dances around it to open at the bottom, and textures that bring the Cavalli focus on materiality to wild new heights. Prints, devorè, patchwork are mixed in ways that bring surfaces alive and make them dance; denim is both real, made in devorè, or photo printed onto silk. Animalier motifs become psychedelic detours around weaves and craft. Shirts flow, trousers flare, tailoring is tall and lean, with bell bottom trouser. Kimonos and liquid dresses have the quintessential Cavalli flow that spills in menswear. Jean jackets are blown up, while lace is cut into figure hugging dresses and tops. It’s the idea of offering separates that women and men can pick up and mix however they prefer. Somewhere, deep down, there is a bourgeois spirit, but that’s been sanded and blasted. In the end, it’s all about dresses as possibilities. Wild or tamed, individual interpretation is what matters.
