Just yesterday, archaeologists announced the discovery of new frescoes in Pompeii—thirty to forty A.D., depicting the initiation rites of Dionysus’s devotees. Perfect timing. Fausto Puglisi, for his part, had already decided that his latest Cavalli outing would center on Pompeii—the ancient pleasure palace of a city, decadent and doomed in equal measure, smothered in volcanic ash nearly two millennia ago. It was love at first sight for him, or so the story goes—he first visited as a child, and it stayed with him, the way ancient beauty and sudden catastrophe tend to do.

Puglisi, like a certain Sicilian duo, has a habit of pinning his collections to specific Italian locales—Carrara’s marble one season, Messina’s sun-baked nostalgia the next. Pompeii, though, is an opulent goldmine, a print-lover’s fever dream: lava flows, frescoes, fig trees. And, naturally, a splash of leopard print—because at Cavalli, leopard is less of a statement than a baseline, a biological necessity. It also happens to be an apt reference. Cavalli himself had a distinctly Dionysian streak—wild, excessive, pleasure-first—so if anyone was due a return to the House of the Tragic Poet, it was him.

Puglisi’s Cavalli, though, is a gentler beast. He’s had four years now to soften the edges, to nudge the brand’s signature maximalism into something more contemporary, less cartoonish. There’s restraint, even sweetness, in the wispy slips embroidered with 3D florals, the diaphanous dévoré velvet gowns. Still, don’t mistake soft for shy. He had Adrian’s power shoulders on his mood board, for one—meaning the jackets and button-downs came fortified with that Hollywood-designer precision, calibrated and deliberate.

And, of course, there’s Dionysus. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the Pompeii archaeological park, describes the god’s female followers as women who “break free from male order to dance freely, go hunting and eat raw meat in the mountains and the woods.” A vision of beautiful, divine disorder. And Puglisi’s Cavalli woman? She’d be first in line.