Roberto Cavalli Fall 2024 Ready-to-Wear

A kinder, gentler Cavalli. Backstage before his show at the Italian Stock Exchange tonight, Fausto Puglisi lamented about the state of the world, “which is not happy,” and the overexposure of women on social media, “which is disturbing in a way.” It was time, he thought, for a pivot.

Out went the Miami Beach pink of last season and the animalia of the season before and in came something more personal: his obsession with Italian marble. Prints are at the root of Cavalli (along with denim), but the house founder preferred animals and vegetables to minerals. Puglisi returned from a trip home to Sicily over the Christmas holiday with photographs of local churches and other historical buildings and used the various kinds of marble found there as a basis for his collection.

“For the first time since I’m here, I wanted to follow my own direction,” he said, “so not using prints from the archive, and [instead] using the codes in terms of slip dress, bias-cut, plissé, and dévoré, but translating them in a way that’s, let’s say, more urban and more tough.” It was a good instinct, and a reminder that successful brand revivals depend less on how closely a designer buys into the house’s original style and more on how much they believe in their own vision.

But strong might be a better word than tough, because there was a welcome softness to the Fortuny-esque pleats on a camisole and midi-skirt set, and on the swingy dress with a cape-like back in a velvet patterned to look like ornate wallpaper. Though the techniques used to reproduce marble’s veins and flakes on the floor-length dévoré dresses were doubtless complicated, the clingy results looked easy to wear while remaining elegant. And the same can be said for the crinkly slip dresses whose mottled prints almost looked tie-dyed.

The Cavalli purists—glamazons is what they used to be called—shouldn’t worry too much about Puglisi’s change of direction. There were plenty of skin-baring cocktail dresses and skirts with ultra-short hemlines in the mix. But the collection’s best pieces were the ones with more material, because the material itself was the story.