Printed Matter

By Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni/Florence

MOST FACTORIES ARE FAIRLY ANONYMOUS, but Roberto Cavalli's headquarters, which are 10 minutes from the Florence airport, instantly reflect the Italian designer's taste for vibrant prints. The minute visitors enter the reception area, they are assaulted by chairs and sofas covered in loud animal stripes and spots.

Cavalli is as famous for his prints as he is for his full-on approach: think giraffe spots on chiffon dresses, beaded psychedelic silk-satin shirts and rhinestone-studded jeans. Stars like Beyonce Knowles, Jennifer Lopez and Lenny Kravitz cannot get enough of it. Valentino may be known as the chic one among Italian designers, but Cavalli is the playboy. Dressed in his uniform of jeans and black leather jacket, he's a rugged-looking 65-year-old with a healthy head of salt-and-pepper hair who has the former Miss Universe wife, the beautiful children, the Tuscan palazzo, the yacht, the Ferrari, the helicopter, the celebrity friends and the humor.

"Yesterday a film producer called me. He wanted to make a movie of my life," Cavalli reveals as he dumps several international cell phones, an iPod and a few loose Cohiba and Montecristo cigars out of a python tote. The designer's rags-to-riches tale is certainly fit for the big screen: a high school dropout with a serious stutter and an impoverished background makes millions of dollars.

Truth be known, there have been two waves of Cavalli: the first in the early 1970s when a barefoot Brigitte Bardot was spotted in his designs in St.-Tropez, and the second in the late '90s when Cavalli was rediscovered by rock-'n'-roll stylists.

It was through his work with prints that Cavalli first came into the fashion business. At art school in the early 1960s, he befriended a fellow student whose family owned an apparel factory. "She said, 'Why don't you do some prints on T shirts?'" An order of 21 T shirts grew to a few hundred, which further swelled to a few thousand, and Cavalli was hooked.

He would make weekly trips to Cuomo--the capital of the textile industry--in a tiny Fiat 500 and then hang around the factories and watch the silk-screen-printing process. "The moment I learned something new, I was driving back to Florence to use it." His printing unit grew from one man helping him to a factory of 30 workers in 1967. He was the first to print patterns on suede and leather, a technique that turned out to be lucrative when both Hermes and Pierre Cardin in Paris snapped up Cavalli's materials. By the early '70s, he had the confidence to design his own ready-to-wear collection.

Today the printing process begins with Cavalli's digital camera with which he documents images he likes--flowers, nature, sunsets--before downloading them to the computer. The next stop is the main printing area: two warehouse-size rooms occupied by 10 wooden counters, each the length of a billiard table, that run along one wall. Here the screens will be laid out for printing. Colors are chosen from a line of plastic jugs and are mixed in a special machine. "Before, we mixed by hand, pouring this in and that in. Very trial and error," he admits. "Now we have the computer do all the percentages of chemicals and colors."

Walking over to the square printing screens that are stored on a rack on wheels, Cavalli chooses one that depicts a zebra stripe and, with the help of an employee, places the screen over a table that is stretched tightly with plain white silk. Cavalli checks that the screen is clicked in place on both sides of the table, pours out a thick glob of black paint, grabs a wooden bar and smears the paint to the other side with it. Afterward, he lifts up the screen to show the design. Ten minutes go by, and the process begins again, this time with white paint. "Each different color in a design needs a screen," he explains. "So 16 colors means 16 screens." Most of the plain white silk and sky blue wire printing templates come from Albisetti in Cuomo.

After the colors of the print dry, they are permanently fixed in an enormous washing machine--like apparatus. Since the process makes the material starchy and stiff, however, it has to be steamed for an hour in another machine and then rolled out and softened.

The process is long and complicated, but Cavalli remains adamant about keeping his operation in Italy despite the lure of cheaper labor costs in China. "China is today's obsession," he says with disgust. "They try to copy everything, and it is terrible. In a couple of years, many factories will close because of China, and this is just the beginning."

There is one step in the printing process about which Cavalli swears nobody else in the world knows. He walks over to where a young technician sitting in front of a computer has scanned a design that is being printed out on yards of white silk using a machine called the Monna Lisa. "After an hour, I can have material in my hand," Cavalli says, considerably impressed. "It's good because it allows me to try ideas out and see them immediately. It stops me from making mistakes."