Roberto Cavalli Women's Fashion Brand

Roberto Cavalli is an Italian fashion designer, and the brand was founded in 1970. The high-end Italian fashion house Roberto Cavalli sells luxury clothing, perfume and leather accessories. Those two sentences set this profile's level: of the seven R brands, Cavalli is the European luxury house, and its women's clothing is researched as designer product - original prints, treated denim and leather work - rather than as contemporary or athletic apparel. Everything else on this page is the account of how that house was built.

In the early 1970s, Cavalli invented and patented a printing procedure on leather, and started creating patchworks of different materials. He is known for exotic prints and for creating the sand-blasted look for jeans. A patented technique is a strong founding record for a fashion house: the brand's identity begins with a process - printing on leather - and a material experiment, patchwork, before it becomes a look. The exotic prints the house is known for grow from that technical root, and the official Roberto Cavalli women's site is linked in this page's References.

1994: Sand-Blasted Jeans in Milan, Boutiques from Saint Barth to Venice

In Milan in 1994, Cavalli presented the first sand-blasted jeans; by December of the same year he had opened boutiques in Saint Barth, in the French Caribbean, followed by others in Venice and Saint-Tropez. The sequence is worth reading slowly: a denim treatment - sand-blasting, the distressed finish Cavalli is credited with creating - presented as a Milan fashion statement in 1994, and a boutique map the same year that runs from a Caribbean resort island to Venice and Saint-Tropez. That is the house's luxury positioning in dated facts: resort glamour and Italian craftsmanship in one record.

The personal record is just as plain: in 1980, Roberto Cavalli married Eva Düringer. And the house's more recent chapter is dated just as precisely: Paul Surridge succeeded Peter Dundas as creative director for the brand in May 2017. A creative-director succession matters to a women's shopper because it marks the collections: the Dundas-era and Surridge-era women's ranges are different design records under one house name, and the May 2017 date is the dividing line.

Just Cavalli and the Wider Directory

This page's links include the Just Cavalli women's brand guide in this directory's J section - the house's companion line, given its own profile just as Cavalli itself is given one here. That link is the researcher's next step for the younger end of the Cavalli world, while this profile stays with the main house: luxury clothing, perfume and leather accessories, exotic prints, patchworks of different materials, and jeans with the sand-blasted look. Between the two profiles, the directory covers the name at both levels.

Shopped as women's clothing, the house's signatures become buying checks: prints judged on the fabric they are printed on and the clarity of the work; leather pieces judged with the house's own history in mind - this is the brand that began by patenting a way to print on leather; and denim checked for the treated, sand-blasted finish that is a Cavalli creation. Prices sit at the high-end level stated for the house, so condition and authenticity checks matter on any resale purchase. The record, in brief: founded 1970, a patented process, a 1994 denim moment, and a creative director change in May 2017.

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