“After 25 years, Roberto Cavalli has been discovered,” the designer joked in 2001. Although his career began with a bang in 1970 (and though his label predates that of Gianni Versace, to whom he is often compared), Cavalli spent almost two decades in relative obscurity before being reborn as a red carpet star in the 1990s.

An art student turned “fashion artist,” as he put it, Cavalli in the early 1970s earned commissions from Hermès and Pierre Cardin on the strength of his innovations in printing on leather. The sexiest stars of the day, including Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren, sported his clothes on the streets of the Côte d’Azur. A Bergdorf Goodman ad summed up his appeal with purple praise: “With extraordinary abandon, young individualist Roberto Cavalli has captured Italy with his untamed suede sportswear . . . some wildly savage, some regally elegant.”

With the arrival of the Japanese avant-garde in the 1980s, however, Cavalli fell out of favor. “That was the beginning of Japanese fashion; everything went minimal,” he told the London Evening Standard. “Black and white. You understand it was not my time.” But Cavalli came roaring back to prominence once the first fires of minimalism had subsided in the mid-1990s. With his helicopter, yacht, Ferraris, racehorses, clubs, vineyard, and nubile coterie, Cavalli crafted an extravagant public image—and his animal-print, gilded, strass-covered, and lavishly embroidered sexpot gowns were as conspicuous as their creator.

But to dismiss Cavalli as simply a maker of tinseled fripperies would be too facile an analysis. Yes, Cavalli was the perfect man to redesign the classic Playboy Bunny costume; yes, he has crowed that “excess is success.” But as Vogue’s Hamish Bowles has written, “The sheer, outrageous courage of Cavalli’s convictions allows him to filter and shake up influences and make them all his own.”

Peter Dundas, who worked for many years behind the scenes at Cavalli before his seven-year stint at Emilio Pucci, took the reins of the company in 2015. Following his departure, Paul Surridge was named creative director in 2017.

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