Roberto Cavalli opens flagship on Tmall Luxury Pavillion

The products showcased on Roberto Cavalli’s online store range from menswear and womenswear to leather goods, accessories and furniture. They are all “defined by Roberto Cavalli’s glamorous contemporary aesthetic, quintessentially embodying Italian excellence, craftsmanship and the label’s Mediterranean roots,” within a “global fashion store offering a multi-dimensional shopping experience,” said the label in a press release.

 

Roberto Cavalli, whose creative director is Fausto Puglisi, is owned by the Dubai-based Damac Properties group, in turn owned by Emirates billionaire Hussain Sajwani, who came to the rescue of the embattled Florentine label in 2019, through his private equity firm Vision Investments.

Roberto Cavalli was born in Florence, the scion of a tailoring family. He initially followed in the footsteps of his grandfather Giuseppe, a painter, but a passion for textile design prompted him to switch from art to fashion. Cavalli’s fashion career began with him painting flowers on knitwear. After his early successes, he continued to innovate, patenting a new method to create inlaid leather (a patchwork technique using dyed and printed leather), which he first presented at a runway show for the Salon du Prêt-à-Porter in Paris in 1970. Cavalli then continued to create new nature-inspired motifs, which he printed on all kinds of materials, from silk to leather and denim.

 

Since Tmall Luxury Pavilion (owned by Chinese giant Alibaba) was launched in 2017, over 200 leading international brands from the luxury and premium consumer goods sectors have joined the platform, their products ranging from fashion to cosmetics, jewellery, watches and even cars.

 

With this more upscale version of its generalist portal Tmall, the Alibaba group is making available to brands individual web pages that are easily customisable with their corporate identity, and is giving them access to their Chinese customers’ data.