Roberto Cavalli SS27 Takes the Archive for a Drive Down Sunset Boulevard
For a textile-heavy, print-stacked line up.
Roberto Cavalli turns its lens toward West Coast culture with the debut of its Spring/Summer 2027 collection at Milan Fashion Week. Creative Director Fausto Puglisi looked directly to early-2000s house archives to ground 45 distinct looks, bridging historical Italian craftsmanship with the chaotic, sun-bleached atmosphere of Los Angeles. Titled “House of Prints: The Muses in Los Angeles,” the collection leans into the idea of LA as a place where glamour and grime share the same stretch of road, where the sunsets look better because of the smog hanging over the freeways and nobody seems especially bothered by the contradiction.
Prints, naturally, do most of the talking. Roberto Cavalli came to fashion through printing, and grew up around his father’s work restoring paintings, so pattern here carries the weight of a family trade, and Puglisi stacks it with a deliberate carelessness that lets leopard sit on top of tiger while tattoo motifs, ray skin, florals and python crowd in wherever there’s room. There’s no attempt to rank one decade’s references above another’s, and the overall effect feels like scrolling through a camera roll that spans twenty-odd years in one sitting.
Denim remains the house’s playground, with jeans cut apart and pieced back together before being finished with a 3D trompe l’oeil print and appliqué, applied in two passes so the surface looks like it has been lived in several times over. That habit of customizing and remaking denim has been part of Cavalli for decades, and this season it feels like the method holding the whole collection together. Patterned graphics clash across pigmented satin and pictorial devoré garments, blending leopard, tiger, ray skin, floral and tattoo renderings into singular pieces.
Footwear leans unapologetically into the ’90s with jewelled sabots and the house’s snake designs in both heeled and flat versions, and the accessories round out with aviator sunglasses and the return of the Dea bag, which anyone who remembers the brand’s mid-2000s peak will be very happy to see again.
For more from Milan Fashion Week SS27, check out Louise Trotter’s third collection for Bottega Veneta.
