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Roberto Cavalli's Urban Haute Style
By Godfrey Deeny
Photos by Gruber-FWD
MILAN, Mar 6, 2003/ FWD/ --- Leave it to Roberto Cavalli to put a smile back on your face.
Fashion's most outrageous sampler dabbled with graffiti art, carnival moods, cinematic
backdrops and a breeze of Jean-Michel Basquiat to produce a collection of great clothes
and powerful imagery.
He called it "Urban Haute Style," and it had enough energy to enliven and delight a score
of scenes, from high-end cocktail parties and rock star bashes to beachside rave parties
and red carpet openings.
Staged before giant screens on which were projected everything from Fritz Lang's Metropolis
to classic Italian movies to Park Avenue traffic jams, the show featured sexy slip dresses
in Yves Klein blue emblazoned with arty daubs and graffiti smears.
The models practically sent off a haze the looks were so steamy, from Dewi in a colorful
leopard print negligee dress worn with a Gothic choker to Alek Wek in a multi-colored
leather jumpsuit with a glittering logo on her back that read "Goddess."
Even a comfy item like a cardigan looked hot when made with sleeves of gray wolf.
With a thundering funk soundtrack that kept 2,000 pairs of feet tapping throughout the noon
show, Cavalli raised the temperature further with a flauntabulous cocktail dress composed
of pink feathers and sexy slashed columns, worn with silvery pink battered leather bomber
jackets.
The finale, a score of super-tight leotards and catsuits into which the models must have
been poured, screamed "Carnival!" Cavalli even called his runway a flow of asphalt,
the name coincidentally that favela dwellers in Rio give to the bourgeois parts of their city.
Just as the Alps geographically cut off the Italian peninsula from the rest of Europe,
so Italy's celebs remain a race apart.
The paparazzi got into a frenzied scrum over singer Eros Ramazzotti, who no one in
New York would even recognize, and devoted a great deal of attention to a well-preserved
blonde named Marta Marzotta, who sat on the ground between the feet of Salvatore Ligresti.
Besides owning the huge exhibition space where the show was staged, Ligresti is also
known as the Concrete King of Italy.
No wonder Cavalli said he called his catwalk Asphalt.
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