Fausto Puglisi has been seen on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival this week, vamping alongside the model Natasha Poly—his “Venus”—and loving every minute of it. Cannes is native territory for the Roberto Cavalli brand. The house founder, who died last month at 83, couldn’t take credit for the term “glamazon” (it actually dates all the way back to 1943 when it was used to describe the 6’2” actress Dorothy Ford), but he deserves much credit for our contemporary understanding of the word.
The collection Puglisi designed for resort operates in a lower key, as pre-season offerings tend to do, but not much lower. Circa Y2K Cavalli is flying off the racks at vintage stores around the world with a new generation of young people yearning to do some vamping of their own. Puglisi’s resort mood board is full of their photos and many of his new clothes are made in their image: a thigh-grazing slip with zebra stripes, a silky button-down leotard that arches above hip bones exposed by a low-slung mini, and an excellent pair of waistband-less wide-leg jeans slashed, as if by claws, with more animal stripes.
But Puglisi didn’t overdo the youth angle, knowing from experience that women well into their 40s and 50s are often still hungry to release their inner glamazons, even if, or perhaps because of the way the culture loses interest in them as they age. For them, he did a swaggy trench in graphic black-and-white zebra, and a mannish pantsuit in a vivid rose print treated with the crinkly froissée technique that was a Cavalli signature. To cap everything off? The cowboy hat, which is suddenly everywhere thanks to Beyoncé, who is herself quite a Puglisi fan.