There are fashion shows where you sit there quietly taking notes, trying to understand what the designer is saying.

And then there are Roberto Cavalli shows where you basically need to hold onto your chair.

OH MY GOD.

Leopard. Tiger. Zebra. Flowers. Gold. Pink. Coral. Crystal. Feathers. Low waists. Bare stomachs. Sheer chiffon. Denim covered in things. More leopard. Then some more leopard because, apparently, we hadn’t quite got the message.

And yet, somewhere underneath all that noise, there was something surprisingly tender happening.

Fausto Puglisi took the Cavalli vocabulary — the animals, the skin, the chiffon, the chains, the sex, the excess — and started pulling it apart.

Not carefully.

Not politely.

He shredded it.

The collection begins almost exactly where you would expect Cavalli to begin: animal prints, warm golds, ochres, claret, plum, bodies wrapped in chiffon, denim loaded with crystals and feathers. It is familiar territory. Almost dangerously familiar.

But then things start to fray.

Patterns collide inside the same garment. Leopard meets brocade. Tiger meets toile. Fabrics are sliced diagonally, stitched together, left raw. And eventually the clothes seem to stop pretending they were ever meant to stay intact.

Chiffon hangs from dresses in ribbons.

Fabric trails behind the body.

Prints dissolve into other prints.

The clothes look as though they’ve survived something.

And I think that’s where this collection gets interesting.

Because Cavalli has always understood glamour as something physical. Skin. Movement. Hair. A body walking into a room and suddenly the room feels different.

But this time the glamour feels slightly damaged.

A little hungover.

A little after-the-party.

And honestly? I like that.

The models walk out with enormous, almost feral hair, bare-looking skin and very little of the polished bombshell beauty we normally associate with the house. There is something deliberately undone about it. The hair is huge but not precious. The makeup is restrained until the occasional flash of teal around the eyes arrives and suddenly — THERE SHE IS.

It’s not the Cavalli woman getting ready for the party.

It’s the Cavalli woman the morning after.

And maybe that is why the collection feels slightly more human than some of the house’s maximalism usually does.

The prints are still screaming, obviously.

But the woman wearing them looks like she has actually lived in them.

There is also a very deliberate return to the early-2000s Cavalli language: low-rise denim, visible thong straps, bralettes, animal prints, chain belts and that particular kind of unapologetic sensuality that makes you wonder whether fashion ever really left 2003 or simply went to therapy for a few years.

And this is where I found myself conflicted.

Because sometimes the nostalgia works beautifully.

The shredded dresses are fantastic because they don’t simply reproduce the past. They make the past look damaged, unstable, almost archaeological. They take something recognisable and make it feel slightly strange again.

But then there are moments when the archive starts looking a little too much like the archive.

You see the same combinations returning: embellished denim, bralettes, low waists, animal print, feathers. And eventually you start knowing what’s coming before the model reaches the end of the runway.

That is the strange problem with nostalgia in fashion, isn’t it?

You want the memory.

You just don’t want the photocopy.

The strongest moments here are the ones where Puglisi takes something quintessentially Cavalli and makes it slightly uncomfortable.

A leopard print doesn’t simply sit on a dress. It breaks apart.

A floral isn’t sweet. It becomes enormous, almost aggressive.

A chiffon gown doesn’t float beautifully behind the body. It looks like it’s coming undone.

Even the coral motif — appearing through jewellery, charms and finally the closing look — gives all this visual madness a tiny thread of continuity.

And then there is that final image.

Red.

Chiffon.

Python.

Cape-like sleeves.

A coral branch sitting at the throat.

After all the leopard and gold and pink and animal skin, the show ends somewhere warmer and stranger.

Almost organic.

Almost alive.

And suddenly I started thinking about the collection less as a celebration of Cavalli’s past and more as a question about what you actually do with a famous archive.

Because there is a temptation, when a house has such an instantly recognisable visual language, to keep bringing out the greatest hits.

Leopard!

Low rise!

Crystal denim!

Sexy!

Again!

Again!

Again!

But fashion becomes much more interesting when the designer takes those things and asks what they can become now.

That is what I think the shredded pieces are doing.

They’re saying: yes, this is Cavalli. But what happens if we tear Cavalli apart?

And maybe that’s the real tension of this collection.

When does remembering become repeating?

I don’t think the show completely answers it.

Somewhere in the middle, it comes very close.

Then it pulls itself back.

And perhaps that’s okay.

Because the most interesting thing about this collection isn’t that it gives us a new Cavalli woman.

It’s that it gives us an old Cavalli woman who looks slightly different after everything she’s been through.

Messier.

Louder.

A little more damaged.

Still completely obsessed with leopard.

Obviously.

And maybe that’s enough for now.