Any expectations for a genial if predictable conversation were blasted out of the water around minute three, when Cavalli started telling the crowd about making love to his wife for the first time.
‘We make love the first night after wedding . After three, four years that we were together, that was the first time. I got my first daughter after nine months and 10 days.’
Cavalli met his second wife when she was a contender in the Miss Universe competition, and he was a judge. But:
‘Between my first wife and my second wife, there was many other—not wife—but important women in my life. I’m sorry! What can I tell you? I can just tell you that the fashion world is one special world, is one planet.... [I]n that planet, I am only straight man.’
The recollections and witticisms continued in such rapid succession that the best way we can find to convey the feeling of the night is through a series of quotes. Consider:
- ‘I like when a woman is soft, but wild at the same time. Maybe that is the reason why I like the feline and the animal design.’
- ‘I am a straight man. But at the same time, I adore the femininity. Sometimes, I miss in myself a small piece of this femininity. It is hard to explain to you. I think to be the only man that think that the women are more intelligent than the men are. Really. Absolutely. That is the reason the man tries to be stronger.’
- ‘To create a beautiful dress is creation; to make a beautiful dress is creation. To be in the sky—or, not just in the sky... but in the middle of the sea, with water all around—that gives me feeling for creation.’
- ‘I love to travel, because I discovered that every different country where we go has a different sky, different clouds, different colours. I love to spend time to watch the movement of the clouds. Because sometimes I think that God speaks to us through the clouds.’
- ‘[The Duchess of Cambridge ] has to be one way: conservative. And Roberto Cavalli is not conservative.’
Cavalli is a designer. He’s also an adventurer (he recently spent three days with the last cannibalistic tribe in Papua New Guinea), a photographer, a ‘helicopter acrobat’, a charmer, a cowboy, a club owner and a freshly minted yacht designer. He’s an animal lover too, keeping horses, parrots and a macaque at his Italian homes. And, oh, by the way, he once nursed a tiger cub back to health, rescuing the cub from a zoo after it was rejected by its mother. ‘I was really dreaming to make friends with a tiger.... And he start to love me. To have the love for one tiger is such a special thing.’
Mainly, though, he’s got women figured out: ‘Beauty is not enough. Beauty is beautiful for one day, one week. Every woman has to show what there is inside. If not, is not enough, beauty. Believe me.’
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