Mike Tyson is the new face of Roberto Cavalli

Mike Tyson is the new face of Roberto Cavalli's SS22 campaign, the first menswear campaign under the new creative director Fausto Puglisi. The legendary boxing champion is the protagonist of a video shot by Tommaso Ottomano accompanied by a visual apparatus that mixes cut-outs of Tyson, tabloid pages with images of products and models that recall the pages of a fanzine. 

The collection, which reinvents Cavalli's bold aesthetic in an even more flashy and daring sense, is inspired by Andy Warhol's Pop Art and Tyson's role in it is no accident. Puglisi said in a statement: 

Mike Tyson is one of the last living pop icons and beyond being a boxing champion, he is also a stylish man, with a very personal and eccentric taste. But more than the undisputed boxing champion and American icon, his personal story is also a tale of survival, struggle, and resilience. He embodies America in both the American Dream and all the possibilities it holds, but also its reverse. 

Choosing Tyson as the face of a fashion campaign in 2021, in the era of #MeToo and call-outs, is a decidedly bold move considering how the boxer served six years in prison for the rape of eighteen-year-old Desiree Washington in the 90s – a process still controversial in many respects both for the accusations made against Tyson and for the performance of the same, held in Indianapolis, one of the capitals of the Ku Klux Klan, and with one of the jurors who was dismissed by the judge after the outbreak of a fire in his hotel. The brand has however written that "any controversy about the character does not scare Puglisi".