MILAN, ITALY — Roberto Cavalli’s Fausto Puglisi took a trip to LA this season. Not literally, of course, but the label’s chief creative officer has stumbled on Sunset Boulevard’s twilights, documenting the striking and electrifying lights, and he translated that inspiration into clothes that conjured, in various ways, visceral apparel, balmy spaces, and the texture of those surrounding them.
The most intriguing iteration of the theme was a pile of prints with a Y2K verve, which looked particularly cool when teamed with easygoing skirt numbers. Elsewhere, there were customised denim separates that were cut, destroyed and reassembled, morphing into a style cycle that continues to define the label’s key vernacular. But the collection’s real focus, and its strength, was the medley of print and volume.
Prints piled on top of each other, ditching all manner of hierarchies while embracing the codes of accumulation: a disruption that is feverishly conceived and runs supreme in this collection, alive because of it. Textures, fragments, and layers representing different decades are held together in the same trend territory, epitomising the very spirit of Los Angeles.
“Because fashion exists only when it speaks to its own time,” explain the notes. That very feeling runs through the volumes: slouchy pieces, almost sportswear, smoothing over a Californian body that for the designer embodies free and unapologetic style, are rooted everywhere and nowhere by way of defiant, far from any traditional offerings—gaining utmost fascination from celebrities like Cardi B, who cheered as models took the runway by storm. Further highlights and standouts ranged from the likes of slip dresses and asymmetric tops infused with pictorial devoré, a pigmented satin narrated with python and worn over chiffon crêpe, and stretched jersey textures—making everything more seductive and glamorous.
All told, this was a typically savvy outing from Fausto Puglisi, a brand that has both a solid sense of the kind of clothes uptown girls want in their wardrobe and the wit to give those pieces some idiosyncratic spin. “I wake up every day asking myself, what’s the meaning of my job?” Puglisi muses backstage post-show. “It’s extremely important to ask because everything is so lost, and I mean everything is a problem: human rights and humanity, at the end of the day,” he shares. Puglisi is obsessed with literature and movies.
“That’s why I go to L.A. and stay at Venice Beach, which is far away from Hollywood, because I like to see different kinds of characters,” he says. “And so at the end of the day, when I keep on doing my job I feel like it’s my drug and my biggest love; since I have a responsibility, because I work for the House of Cavalli, I try to create something connected to the youth, to the young generation. And probably our generation is more optimistic than what we can be.”
Puglisi feels responsible for keeping up that joyful feeling. “It’s an escape,” he says. “Whatever you look around, whatever news you read, I try to resist creating something which is beautiful, which creates optimism. And it’s like creating a script for a director or for a writer,” he says. “I say all the time: we don’t need fashion. I say to myself all the time that I am the opposite as a human from what I create. I like to be with my dogs at home, watching movies, and reading books. I don’t like to party nor to go out anymore,” he then shares.
“At the same time, I’m obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock, with beauty or with controversial stuff as well; also with the Coen brothers.” What he cherishes about the house is the possibility to create items as an object. “Maybe you cannot wear them, but you feel them, you have them, you put them in your wardrobe, and you watch them, and you feel better,” he grins. “It’s about joy.”
by Chidozie Obasi