“Animals have the best dresses,” the Italian fashion designer Roberto Cavalli, known for his use of exotic prints, told students at Oxford in 2013. “God made them so well-dressed. Women love these designs,” he claimed, “they feel natural in them.”
For more than half a century, Cavalli was the teenage tearaway of European fashion. To an industry dominated by more conservative designers, he brought an idiosyncratic, cheerfully ostentatious glamour that proclaimed shorter, brighter and tighter was always better. His critics held that his clothes lacked refinement and caricatured his often-gaudy brand of hedonism as appealing only to the wives of footballers. Journalists dubbed him “the king of bling”.
Yet many women found his unabashed adoration of the female form liberating, and his celebrity clientele included
