How do you keep a brand known for its glitz and high-wattage fashions powered up for the long run?
It’s a tightrope exercise that Fausto Puglisi has been pulling off for the past six years as creative director of Roberto Cavalli.
Speaking at the WWD x SJ Global Fashion and Business Conference hosted in partnership with the Hong Kong Fashion Council, the designer reflected on how he has brought currency to the Italian brand’s maximalist blueprint of sensuality and freedom, created buzz with designs aligned with the founder’s spirit as much as consumers’ approach to dressing — and that Skims collaboration.
“I love the Cavalli identity,” he said in a conversation with Fairchild Media Group chief content officer James Fallon. “What’s fantastic is the attraction from the young generation to the archive moment and the early 2000s experience connected to Christina Aguilera, Paris Hilton, Destiny’s Child.”
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Plus, Cavalli, who died in 2024 at age 83, was “a genius” and “probably the only Italian hippie designer” thanks to his revolutionary approach to denim in the 1970s, his creative successor pointed out.
The brand’s aura of overt glamour and sex appeal remains alive and well in collective imagination but Puglisi is keenly aware of the evolution that has taken place over the 25 years since.
“The perception of women has changed,” he said. “Everything is more confident, cooler. You don’t need to be sexy to please someone. You want to be sexy because you like sexiness, because you like freedom.”
Musical artists such as FKA Twigs, Doja Cat and Taylor Swift “want to be free,” Puglisi continued. “So it’s a perception of femininity, it’s a perception of independence, it’s a perception of confidence which has changed and I’m working to advocate for diversity freedom.”
With the likes of drama series “Euphoria” shining a spotlight on a young generation full of confidence and differences, he feels “it’s important to celebrate differences in fashion.”
Hence the approach he has taken as creative director.
“My point of view when I create [for] Cavalli is to celebrate the DNA of course, but I like to think about what’s going on now,” he said.
It sounds straightforward but it’s no mean feat with a strong brand identity as a foundation. The Cavalli brand rose to prominence in an era when houses prescribed whole silhouettes.
“You could be an Armani person…a Versace person…a Cavalli person,” Puglisi pointed out. “Now, everything is much more fluid. Everything is different.”
Mixing eras and aesthetics is the name of today’s game for consumers, male or female. “It’s easy to find someone wearing Cavalli jeans with a beautiful Chanel grandmother jacket and an Hermès bag,” he continued.
Rather than dial down the Roberto Cavalli playbook, the designer has opted to “create a special wardrobe of separates,” he explained. “Like pills of happiness.”
Take his pre-fall 2026 collection, in which different elements charmingly converged into a visually flamboyant coherent ensemble with a globetrotting groovy ’70s vibe.
As a result, shopping his designs is “like when you go on Spotify to buy a song,” he went on. “You like that song, you want that song. It’s the same. I like that shirt, I want to buy what I want.”
His creative modus operandi is to “define different women within the same vocabulary,” with particular attention on “including different kinds of sensitivities,” as he put it.
This mix-and-match approach played right into his own magpie sensibilities. “I like different kinds of aesthetics, not just one kind,” he said. “We live in a world where everything dialogues together…so it’s important to dialog through [a] different lens.”
This openness is what has long underpinned his knack for working with bold-face names and pull off the feat of dressing celebrities as vastly different as Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Swift with equally great effect.
“Everything is extremely natural in a moment where brands fight to have ambassadors, celebrities, celebrities, celebrities,” he said. “For me, the relationships with celebrities is extremely natural and organic.”
After all, the Sicilian designer’s been at it since he moved to New York City at the age of 17. Within five years, he got his big break designing outfits for Whitney Houston, including her Grammy Awards looks. Soon after came Michael Jackson and Madonna, to name but a few.
Creating for artists is an exercise he loves. “It’s fantastic, you create mise en scene,” he said. “It’s a dialogue to create magic and to create something beautiful, interesting.”
For this self-avowed perpetually curious pop culture obsessive, there’s nothing more fascinating than Kim Kardashian, one of his early supporters when he launched his eponymous brand.
“She commands pop culture, she’s a contemporary Marilyn Monroe,” he said. “You can like it or not, but Kim Kardashian is Kim Kardashian [and] is a sociological phenomenon.”
Still, when she slid into his DMs, which led to a highly successful collaboration between Cavalli and Skims, it was thrilling.
As for what else inspires him, it’s easy. “Everything I do, every breath I [take] is an inspiration for me,” he said. In Hong Kong, he rode the subway simply to observe how people dress and move because he believes understanding people is important for a designer.
In conversation, Puglisi drops a sampling of his obsessions, spanning Asian cartoons; filmmakers Dario Argento and David Lynch; Tony Duquette, which the designer discovered through prominent Hong Kong retailer Joyce Ma, one of his first customers; Andy Warhol, and the “Madonna-Michael Jackson moment.”
Music is also a big one. “I love music because it’s extremely democratic,” he said. “Even if you don’t understand the words, music gets inside your skin and gives you an emotion.”
At a time where the fashion industry is at the intersection of a creative changing of the guard, shifting aesthetics and constant proclamations on what luxury should be, Puglisi remains steadfast in his passion for creation.
“I love my job, I live for my job, it’s like my gift,” he said. “Even when I sleep, I create, I have ideas. I wake up and I start sketching. Last night, I was at dinner and I asked for a pen because I had an idea.”
Don’t go talking to him about trends such as quiet luxury. Puglisi won’t let himself be distracted from his chosen course: telling “a true story, a loyal story” of beauty, joy and emotion.
He sees it as the bedrock of Cavalli’s current commercial success, be it in Miami, Macao or Saint-Tropez. “[Stores are] performing so well because in a moment where everything is so dark, it’s beautiful to play for escape,” he said.
That tracks straight back to deeply human desires.
“We live for beauty, right? We want to be beautiful, we want to be attractive,” Puglisi said. “I believe in the law of desire, it’s extremely important.”
