Fausto Puglisi took a hard right turn toward Old Hollywood razzle-dazzle last season with results that looked like the love children of Edith Head and Tony Duquette. For fall he was back in glamazon mode, channeling Roberto Cavalli at his most Cavalli-esque. We may have been in Milan’s Stock Exchange, but the vibes were hedonistic, with patchwork leather trimmed in crystals, animalia motifs of many kinds, and piles and piles of fur—faux fur, he was quick to clarify, which he made in collaboration with a factory in Japan where they’ve perfected authentic-looking fakes.
Denim was another focal point. Jeans are how Cavalli got his start; backstage Puglisi talked about the house founder’s #vanlife early days, when he tooled around Italy scrounging for denim scraps that he collaged into hippie treasures. They were the inspiration for some of the most hands-on, highly embellished pieces Puglisi has made yet at the label. A pair of bell-bottoms were so shredded and shaggy they almost looked like fur too.
Beyond the archival references, the mood board was loaded up with early-aughts photos of Kate Moss in black lace and pictures of Georgia O’Keeffe and Millicent Rogers in their high-desert muftis. A 2022 trip through the American Southwest is still reverberating with Puglisi, and he conjured the aesthetic with tooled leather, silver studding, and turquoise beads.
Moss’s black lace was reinvented in countless different ways—as a devoré robe with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, sleeves; as a sheer catsuit with feather-trimmed flared legs and another in openwork crochet; and as a sequined lace miniskirt on Abbey Lee, not seen in these parts since before Max Max: Fury Road. This collection lived up to Roberto Cavalli’s reputation for excess and then some. All together on the runway, it could feel like information overload, but backstage Puglisi shrugged it off. “It’s just a bunch of separates,” he said, and he made the point when he showed a studded and beaded leather motorcycle jacket on both a man and a woman.
Collection
This article was originally published on Vogue Runway.
