The Painted Years.
Vintage Roberto Cavalli is not what you think it is. 1970s hand-painted suede — the man and the artist, before the icon.
A forgotten chapter.
Roberto Cavalli’s hand-painted suede collection, and the artist before the icon — c. 1970.
Nearly thirty garments, made in Florence in the early 1970s — before he was the designer we’d come to know as Roberto Cavalli.
The Met holds pieces from this period. So do others. It surfaces on resale sites too, sold without context. Biographies mention it in a line or two. What’s never happened is the work and the story, shown together.
Cranes and swallows in flight across a bodice. A bird of paradise sweeping the length of a skirt in gold and lavender. Roses rendered like watercolour on cream. Gold and blue clouds scattered down an olive sleeve. Each was hand-painted or printed using a technique he’d patented himself — leather treated like fabric, years before anyone else did it. This was never mass production.
The enamel flower snaps were made for these garments. The bindings are hand-finished. Gathered together, with the story of the man who made them, this is the first time the two have been shown side by side.
Floral sprays, hand-painted
Crane panels, enamel snaps
Bird of paradise
Few know that I am the creator and initiator of these leather printing techniques.
He wrote it himself, on a personal blog with a small readership, decades after the fact. He knew the beginning of his story had been lost. Almost nobody was reading.
What almost nobody knows.
“That young Florentine, full of hopes, ideas and aspirations, has come a long way.”
He wrote that himself, decades later, looking back — because almost nobody connects any of this to him now. This is the Cavalli before the label most people know: a man who treated leather like a canvas and fashion like an act of nerve.
Brigitte Bardot wore it. So did Sophia Loren. Hermès and Cardin licensed his technique. He showed at the Sala Bianca, inside the Pitti Palace, the room where postwar Italian fashion first introduced itself to the world. He had a store. He was, by any measure, already a success — just not one anyone remembers as his. Fame came again twenty years later, for leopard print and red carpets, and that’s the only version that stuck.
This one came first: fine art, invention, and fashion, moving as one instinct, with no rules and nothing to prove.
The runway, early 1970s — leather and suede ensembles, unmistakably the same hand.
I like to remember my beginnings in the magical world of fashion, I like to remember those moments that have changed my life, the people who have accompanied me in this fantastic journey.
Same blog, same era of his life. He kept returning to the beginning, long after the world had moved past it.
Sewn into the garment.
Some read roberto cavalli per Crissa, Made in Italy. Some read only his name. The hand is unmistakably the same across all of them.
Crissa, an Italian house, appears on several of these pieces — the same leather tags, the same hand-finished flower snaps, the same era of construction as the rest of the work. The timing lines up almost exactly with his first collection, and the provenance isn’t something anyone had to construct: on the pieces that carry it, it is stitched inside the collar.
The authentication, though, is the hand rather than the label. Two founding-era labels, one design language: the same painted suede, the same enamel flower snaps, the same motifs. That continuity is what authenticates the group.
A design held in the Met.
One coat dress in the collection — denim-blue suede, floral sprays trailing down the sleeve and skirt — shares its design with a piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection.
Not missing. Just scattered.
The Met holds five: three ensembles from ca. 1971, all gift of the same donor in 2007; a suit from ca. 1974 that arrived by way of the Brooklyn Museum’s costume collection; a late-1970s ensemble in leather and feathers. None on view. None shown as a group. The Met’s own curatorial notes independently confirm the Sala Bianca exhibition, the 1972 opening, and the Bardot photographs in Saint-Tropez — in the museum’s own words, not ours.
A sixth piece sits in the FIDM Museum in Los Angeles: a poncho from around 1970, purchased outright, its own published essay calling it one of his earliest designs.
Two institutions. Six objects. Fifty years. Not one line connecting them to each other, or to the man who made them.
The world wasn’t ready. It is now.
Search this period and there is almost nothing. The patent is documented. A few lines about the Sala Bianca. Then the record picks up again in the nineties with the Cavalli everyone remembers.
In 1972, printed and painted leather was not what the couture establishment thought fashion was. The material was looked down on. The idea arrived before there was an audience prepared to understand it — and by the time the world caught up, it had been absorbed, imitated, and detached from the man who made it.
Look at these now and they read as entirely current. Something visually similar could be bought new and mass-produced tomorrow. That is what happens to a good idea. These are not that. These are what that came from.
His name has never been louder.
The Y2K revival put his prints back on runways and resale platforms. After his death in April 2024, The RealReal recorded demand for Roberto Cavalli rising two hundred per cent. 1stDibs currently lists more than nine hundred vintage Cavalli pieces.
Nearly all of that is the nineties and after. That is what the market now means when it says vintage Cavalli — and it is chapter two.
The demand is already here. It is simply pointed at the wrong decade. Wait until they find chapter one: hand-painted works on suede, of which very few were made and fewer still survive.
That is the whole opportunity, and it has a clock on it. Attention on a name does not hold indefinitely.
In motion.
The collection, fully documented
Final additions to be completed. Every piece, every label, every detail — the archival record everything else is built on.
NowPress outreach and private showings
Exclusive coverage opportunities offered to select media outlets, ahead of a larger public push.
Begins alongside the lookbook shootEditorial lookbook shoot
A photographed record of the collection as it exists — styled to uphold the integrity of the original designs, with the story, his own quotes, and photography credited alongside the garments.
Running in parallel with press outreachThe exhibition
The Front Room at 12 West 29th, installed as a proper show of his early work — timed to open during Fashion Week, while New York is full and looking, in collaboration with the Orchid Room, the floral studio that shares the floor.
Fashion WeekThe collection release
After the exhibition closes. By then every piece has been documented, published, exhibited and written about — a different proposition entirely to a listing.
Final phase
To tell the story while someone is listening.
These garments have been beautiful for fifty years without anyone knowing what they were the beginning of. Told properly — with the origin, the invention, and the people who were there — they stop being lovely vintage suede and become what they actually are: the first chapter of one of fashion’s most recognisable names, and the proof that the hand was there from the start.
Not a secret. Not lost. Simply disconnected from the name everyone already thinks they know — until now.
laura@reracked.com · reracked.com
Sources — Demand figure: The RealReal, 2024 Resale Report. Listing count and commissions from Hermès and Pierre Cardin: 1stDibs, Roberto Cavalli designer profile. Museum holdings: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute, object records 2007.171.1–3, 155706, 2012.125a; FIDM Museum, accession 2004.5.39. Biographical detail: Roberto Cavalli’s personal blog and published interviews. Photography of the collection: RERACKED.