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MILAN, Italy — Peter Dundas described his return to Roberto Cavalli after ten years at other fashion houses as "starting a process of creating a woman who is truly independent of the past." You couldn't but feel the evolution, the "re-imagining" he was talking about also applied to himself. When he was first at Cavalli, his collaboration with George Cortina was one of the great designer-stylist pairings of the decade. Using the ingredients Cavalli himself had already brought to the table, they cooked up a spicy stew with an instantly recognisable flavour.
But, for his second debut, Dundas fancied a different kind of dish. In trying to determine what his woman wants now, he said he'd decided to "ease her up a little." Let the animal prints, the rococo embellishment and the glamazonia lie for a while. Dial down on the artisanship; focus instead on sportswear and denim, which was, after all, where Cavalli launched his business over 40 years ago.
Dundas showed his denim in tie-dyed pastels, cut into tight, high-waisted jeans and matching jackets. They smacked of the 1980s, and not just because the Human League’s “Love Action” was playing. The tiny ruched skirts and the bandeau tops and one-shouldered dresses, gathered into bows, also evoked memories of the decade that taste allegedly forgot. When Dundas paired a wave of ruffled chiffon with a suede sweatshirt, perforated to represent the animal prints of yore, he got closer to that ideal of easy glamour he was after. And the floating chiffons ingeniously ruched across the body came even closer to the Dundas his acolytes know and love. A couple of shapely leather jackets also confirmed his skill with skins, invaluable when you're confronting a legacy like Cavalli’s.
But the fundamental problem with the collection was highlighted by a pair of contrasting looks towards the end of the show: Hedvig Palm in a multi-tiered ruffled chiffon extravaganza, Katlin Aas hard on her heels (and boy, was she hard!) in a one-shouldered black leather second skin knotted down one side. Talk about worlds colliding. Still, as Dundas himself said, he was starting a process. The fact that his first steps were surprisingly less sure-footed than expected only highlighted how complicated that process is going to be.
