Paul Surridge announced on his personal Instagram account this morning that he has left the Roberto Cavalli company. “I have given much consideration to this decision and reached the conclusion that the mission I have signed on has changed and enters a new direction with a new perspective.” He continued: “I now wish to focus on other projects I put aside in order to achieve our common goals with Roberto Cavalli Group.”
Surridge was a surprise hire in 2017, a menswear designer enlisted to revive a brand long identified with a sultry sort of bohemianism. Designer Roberto Cavalli didn’t coin the term “glamazon,” but it was used to describe his kind of women and the sexy clothes he made for them countless times over the course of his career. In Surridge’s two years at the Italian label, he never quite latched onto the glamazon thing; he prefers order to earthiness. That said, the job wasn’t made easy for him: According to reports, resources were “scarce” and the design team was “underfunded.” Surridge was responsible for the little sister line, Just Cavalli, and a kid’s collection, too.
If those conditions persist, whoever steps into the creative director role next will face challenges. But, inevitably, Surridge’s departure will prompt discussion over who would be the right fit, especially considering that the most obvious guy for the job already came and left. Peter Dundas, who worked at Roberto Cavalli during its peak glamazon years, signed on after Cavalli’s retirement, but exited after just three runway seasons.
The disposability of creative directors is a systemic industry-wide problem, no doubt. The larger question in this specific case: Is Cavalli right for the times? Surridge understood that what he described as the house’s “considered vulgarity” didn’t quite jibe with fashion circa the late 2010s, which spans the hyper-accessorised camp of Alessandro Michele’s Gucci and the fashion-nun minimalism of Celine and The Row, leaving not much room for Cavalli-esque indulgence. He was right to try to tweak the formula. But let’s face it, “mankiller” is just not the mood of the moment. Chalk it up to the #MeToo movement, to the six female Democratic U.S. presidential nominee contenders, to the post-Victoria’s Secret revolution of the lingerie industry… chalk it up to whatever, but “sexy” as Roberto Cavalli knew it feels like a dated concept in 2019.
The best idea I’ve heard for Roberto Cavalli? Hire a female creative director. With gender dynamics shifting everywhere from Capitol Hill to Hollywood, and a new generation coming up that rejects the binary thinking that gave us the objectifying male gaze, it should be a woman who redefines what Cavalli’s brand of sexy is for the new decade. All the more so because since Cavalli’s heyday, a new class of women designers has come up, and they have novel ways of thinking about the subject—women like Nicky Zimmermann of the Aussie line Zimmermann, Carly Cushnie of New York’s Cushnie brand, and Beckett Fogg, who designs the red-hot Area label with Piotrek Panszczyk. It could even be The Attico’s Gilda Ambrosio and Giorgia Tordini, whose hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers want to dress with the kind of swaggering attitude and sense of fun that they do, especially after dark.
Whoever steps in, let’s hope they get a longer run than that of Surridge or his predecessor.
This article originally appeared at Vogue.com
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