In Los Angeles, the evening light catches in the dust of the freeways and never lets go. On Sunset Boulevard, dusk stretches out, phosphorescent, a little toxic, and no one objects. Bret Easton Ellis made the fear of merging on those fast roads the first sentence of Less Than Zero. The city has kept that way of showing everything and blurring everything in the same movement.
It is here that the House of Roberto Cavalli set its spring-summer 2027 collection, House of Prints, subtitled “The Muses in Los Angeles”. The choice is anything but a postcard. Los Angeles, here, is a method of layering.
Roberto Cavalli was born a printer, the son of a picture restorer. The sentence should be enough to place the House. At Cavalli, print is a craft, a heritage, a family gesture that precedes the language of fashion. Denim keeps the most vivid trace of it: customised jeans, cut, distressed, recomposed, a cycle the collection pursues until it becomes a method. Nothing in it is laid flat. On denim, a three-dimensional trompe-l’œil print receives appliqués, in a double pass. Printed tulle is cut into strips, then reassembled. A pigmented satin tells of python. A painterly devoré lets leopard, tiger, tattoo, stingray skin and floral run across the same surface.
The prints pile up without hierarchy. The chaos is built feverishly, and it is this construction that makes it alive. Fragments of different decades hold together in a single present, and the House sees in this the very spirit of the city. Fausto Puglisi, creative director, treats the archive as a living organism: long misunderstood, it ends up, years later, coming into focus from an angle that did not exist. The excesses of the 2000s return without nostalgia. They are claimed because they are honestly Cavalli. One thinks of the restorer father, of that trade which consists in making legible what had been poorly looked at.
The volumes follow the same energy. Stretch jersey pieces, almost sporty, hug a Californian body that Puglisi wants free and without a model, rooted everywhere and nowhere. Beside them, chiffon speaks another language, more European. The Cavalli slip is matched with everything, the slip dress too. The asymmetric top is broken then recomposed. The suppleness of a sari meets the impeccable cut of a Neapolitan tailor’s blazer. The 45 looks are conceived as encounters, not as closed silhouettes. The collection offers only one combination among a thousand. The other 999 belong to whoever dresses.
Underfoot, the 1990s are quoted without detour: jewelled clogs, classic snakeskin, heeled or flat. The sunglasses are aviators. The Dea bag, a historic piece of the House, makes its return.
None of this seeks appeasement. Cavalli asserts a celebration of the body, with party, escape, joy, an openly claimed Dionysian vein. It is an uneasy luxury, at times unsettling, like the city. The body shows itself. It knows it is being looked at, and it is in this precise mechanism that it takes pleasure in being exposed.
On Sunset, dusk begins again. No one has yet decided which of the prints it will light first.
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