Roberto Cavalli is (rightfully) remembered as a joyous sybarite who designed for glamorous women who lived their best life in the designer’s daring prints while showing some skin. However, a new by-appointment exhibition of the Italian designer’s early work, organized by Reracked’s Laura Ellner, will have you rethinking everything you thought you knew about Cavalli’s expressive oeuvre.
By focusing on his technical prowess and artfulness, the vintage expert describes Cavalli’s early ’70s work—mostly in suede and leather—as being authentic, charming, and human.
Cavalli’s career in fashion dates to 1960, when this son of a seamstress, who studied art and architecture in Florence, painted some sweaters for a friend. Soon after, he started teaching himself how to print on knitwear.
While he had some success at it, the would-be designer’s breakthrough, a matter of expediency, occurred a decade later. As the story goes, Cavalli had crashed a party at the home of Mario Valentino, who owned a leather business.
A woman he met there asked what he did and, trying to impress her, Cavalli said he worked with printed leathers, which, according to Ellner, he hadn’t yet tried. The guest introduced Cavalli to Valentino, who asked to see his work.
Cavalli, desperate to deliver, applied his printing technique to tissue-fine glove leather to show the businessman, who encouraged him to continue.
The pieces Ellner has collected are truly extraordinary, with infinitely fine lines creating poster-like art on animal skin, with softly variegated colors and what appears to be hand-painting. Some pieces feature printed appliques.
The silhouettes are typically ’70s—think A-line midis and snug jackets. The motifs, meanwhile, are in a Summer of Love vein, with references to Art Nouveau, Japanese prints, and psychedelia.
The inside of a suede button-up featured an ornate alphabet in a style like that of the Victorian illustrator Kate Greenaway. It’s possible that this topper was from a 1972 collection with “hand-painted motifs of children at play,” which, a contemporary newspaper report said, “received an ovation from the international press.” A Frost Bros. department store ad from the same year touts: “A unique collection of leathers by Roberto Cavalli printed in magnificent patterns and designs.
Fashion individualism in a posh printed leather pants suit.”
What’s clear is that people were impressed with the technique, whatever it entailed. “It was essentially silk-screening adapted to leather…but it wasn’t simply mechanical printing.
Cavalli said the pigments were mixed by hand—‘a bit of this and a bit of that,’ through trial and error—and each color required a separate screen and manually positioned pass,” shares Ellner, who did a deep dive into the topic. “Some surviving garments also appear to have hand-painted details applied over the printed foundation.
Every hide accepted the pigment differently according to its grain, thickness, and porosity, while small variations in alignment, pressure, and color density occurred during printing. The same motif could therefore be repeated without producing two identical objects.”
Cavalli, Ellner continues, “learned the fundamentals by watching printers in Como, then developed a method of printing across already-constructed garments so the design could continue over seams and stitching rather than being interrupted by them. This broader approach became known as Stampa Cavalli; his patented process for printing on leather grew out of it.” It’s believed that Hermès and Pierre Cardin purchased Cavalli’s leathers before he decided to keep this handiwork for in-house use only.
Ellner is a Californian who got hooked on vintage as a pre-teen, launched an eBay store, and moved to New York after school to work in the industry. After a decade working in digital marketing for companies and later, independently as a consultant, Ellner hit a wall.
“One day I realized I didn't like clothes,” and clothes, she said, had always “been my outlet, my source of creativity and my way of communicating with the world.” Having determined that the barrier between herself and garments was a hard and impenetrable computer screen, Ellner unplugged and moved upstate. She signed the lease on her store in Hudson, just as Covid hit.
The dealer later moved Reracked to Kingston, and that’s where the Cavallis found her. Ellner didn’t search out these pieces, but, rather, a woman walked into her Hudson Valley store inquiring if Reracked was buying pieces.
Ellner’s first response was no, but she inquired what was on offer, and upon discovering these rare Cavallis fell head over heels down a research rabbit hole.
The consignee had acquired the pieces from her mother, who had worked for an Italian knitwear firm called Crissa, and she had worn them for fun evenings out, telling Ellner, “I always knew that I felt really cool in them and that there wasn’t going to be anyone else in the room, dressed like I was dressed in 1970.” The labels read Roberto Cavalli for Crissa.
Reracked will display these early Cavalli pieces from September 11-16; they will be available to buy from the 17th. Unlike the recent big sales of Martin Margiela’s archive and a collector’s extensive Comme des Garçons collection, the Cavalli capsule reveals a little-known aspect of the designer’s work, one that is in a gentler, and more bohemian spirit than his more libertine later work.
Ellner loves the stories that vintage holds and is thrilled to share this mostly unread chapter of Cavalli’s work. The icing on the cake is that the Florentine is one of the most searched-for designers of the moment.
She puts this down to Y2K nostalgia and a tendency towards differentiation and individualism in dress. “When I was in high school, I wanted the same sneakers as my best friend,” the dealer says, “but nowadays people want to express themselves.”
“It’s like an intersection of fine art and invention because he patented the technique for printing paint on suede.”—Laura Ellner, Reracked