At the beginning of this evening it would have been long odds indeed on the chances of meeting Apple’s CEO Tim Cook at an excellent Roberto Cavalli show. The biggest outside bet would have been Cook’s surprise appearance, of course, but the insertion of the Cavalli excellence clause would have added significant value to the accumulator. And yet tonight Cook turned up and Cavalli—courtesy of Paul Surridge— delivered.
If you read other reviews, and by all means feel free, you might detect a repressed sniffiness about this show. Cavalli has a reputation problem, plus it is no longer in the position to bolster its position in the fashion system with advertising moola, and Surridge is a designer who, while gifted, has no great personal equity in this strange old business.
Thus it is fashionable (and easy) to look askance at Cavalli right now. And sure, why not? There is no compelling reason to champion it, beyond the fact, which should be primary, that many of these garments were pretty excellent. Surridge interestingly observed that an element of the Cavalli man is to be “obnoxious. He’s on a yacht, and he’s recording his life—he’s obsessed with that—and he wants to stand out.” This observation might sound negative, but it was meant as a synonym for brash confidence, and just like the original Roberto’s iteration of Cavalli, this collection had plenty of that. The difference is that it felt highly wearable now.
Surridge’s Zegna background was evident in the white then black opening sections that featured plenty of python-patinated tailoring. But it was his animalia-heavy middle section that really sang. The idea of keeping the boldest imprint of the lynx, tiger, leopard, and giraffe patterns to the reversed inside of many of the garments was a good one. The proportions were totally in sync with a loose, affectedly uncaring dissonance with tradition. The chunky yet aerodynamic sneakers were totally trend-led, but they worked.
Of course there were off-points. The carpet chosen to floor the venue—a beautiful and rarely accessible monastery outside Florence—was vulgar. But Cavalli is about a kind of considered vulgarity. Whoever chose the carpet understood only one half of that equation, but Surridge increasingly looks to have processed the whole.
