Roberto Cavalli

Roberto Cavalli learned printing from his Florentine painter grandfather — a Macchiaioli artist hanging in the Uffizi — and turned the inheritance industrial: in the early 1970s he patented a method for printing on leather, sold it to Hermès and Pierre Cardin, then kept the best ideas for his own label. Sand-blasted jeans, patchwork denim, and above all the animal prints — leopard, zebra, snake — worn not as trim but as total conviction.

The 2000s were his empire years: Cavalli dressed the era's maximum women — Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, the Spice Girls' reunion wardrobe — and the aesthetic became shorthand for Italian excess in its most cheerful form. The founder sold in 2015 and died in 2024; Dubai's Hussain Sajwani now owns the house.

Fausto Puglisi, the Sicilian who once dressed Madonna's Super Bowl stage, has directed the studio since 2020 with a fan's fluency — gold-drenched collections, butterfly and serpent motifs, the archive's freedom re-argued for a generation that discovered it on resale apps. Florence's wildest export, still roaring.