Roberto Cavalli Interview

Roberto Cavalli gave a very candid interview to W Magazine. The interview is very long so I selected a few excerpts.

“To keep up with the tam-tam of fashion”—he mimics a drumbeat—“we need help from stylists. For Armani, is enough to change one lapel on one jacket. From us the people expect new design, new style, new way to attract the new boyfriend.”

“I tried immediately to have a baby because I was so afraid not to have a baby in my life,” Cavalli said, settling, kinglike, into a baroque leopard-print chair. “My first child was born nine months, 10 days after the wedding. For me, I would expect to have 10! I never understand why God give the possibility to have children just to woman,” he continued, clutching theatrically at his belly. “Oh, my God, my dream would be to have a baby!”


“When I go to a restaurant and they say, ‘We’re fully booked,’ I say, ‘It’s Roberto Cavalli,’ and they say, ‘I will check,’” Cavalli said, clapping his hands with relish. “I love it!”


“It is always about the animal,” Slobodan Mihajlovic, Cavalli’s knitwear designer, told me. “You always have to be ready to find an animal—or even to come up with a new one.”

“Sometimes, because of my success, I am afraid that I was not a good father. With the first two I was too strong, and with the other three I was too weak. I told Tommaso, ‘Take a Ferrari and go to Monte Carlo!’ He said, ‘If I drive a Ferrari, it will be when I am able to buy it myself.’ I say to myself, Okay, Roberto, maybe you were too strict. But Daniele, he take everything. He destroy my Porsche in the highway!”

“I was 18; she was 20,” Cavalli recalled. “I think I give her the first kiss after six months. But I was not innocent—we would go in my Fiat 500! We make love when we married. I remember the first night, our wedding.”

On his 40th-anniversary show, which was to take place in two weeks in Milan: “I will invite the other designers, but they won’t come—they are all shit.” Read the entire interview.