Book now to see Roberto Cavalli talk about his fashion, friends and life, on Tuesday May 27, 2008, at 6.30pm

Roberto Cavalli fits no fashion stereotype. Ninety-nine per cent of male designers are gay men who lead urban lives, like to party and thrive on gossip. Cavalli is straight (two wives and five children), untrained, a farmer, a wine producer and the owner of a pilot’s licence. Yet he holds a dominant position in the international fashion world, and his clothes – renowned for their sexiness – are eagerly sought out by fashionistas and celebrities from David Beckham to Jennifer Lopez.

“I was born in a small Italian mining town in 1940,” he says. “My father worked at the pit and my mother was a housewife. We were a simple family, living in a small house. We were happy. Then, on July 4, 1944, a group of young German soldiers marched into town, rounded up 90 men and youths, including my father, lined them up against a wall and shot them all. And our safe, settled life ended there.”

Cavalli moved to Florence, with his mother and elder sister, where his mother sold coal to eke out a living. The terrible shock of his father’s murder had a deep impact on him: he developed a stutter so debilitating that he stopped going to school. “I grew up on the streets,” he admits. “My mother was too preoccupied with getting enough money to feed us to worry about whether I was at school, so I ran wild.” She eventually accepted that he would never take his education seriously, so she told him: “Go and find work. Steal if you have to.”

By 19, Cavalli was tired of being a tearaway and enrolled himself in art school. “I still had to make money,” he recalls. He did it by selling his own designs, hand-painted on T-shirts. The fashion empire he now runs started on his kitchen table. In four decades, he has reached a point so far from the poverty of his youth that the £20m yacht, the hilltop villa in Tuscany, complete with helipad and statue-studded grounds, and the 80-horse stud farm have seemingly eclipsed his disadvantaged past. “Things were tough when I was young,” he says with a sigh. “And when you are young, it can affect you in a way you never forget for the rest of your life.”

Cavalli soon had more work than he could cope with. “There were times when I seemed to be working for 20 hours a day, up to three days at a time. But when you are young, you are never tired, and when you are doing what you want, you are too excited to feel it.”

In 1970, his fashion journey began in earnest: almost by accident, he discovered how to print on leather, a technique that both Hermès and Pierre Cardin wanted to buy. But he didn’t sell. Instead, he produced his own collection and learnt a vital lesson: “I realised that, like my grandfather, who was a skilful painter in Florence, I am an artist, not a dressmaker. So I’ve always needed the help of a stylist.”

Cavalli found the perfect one in his second wife, Eva, who was 18 when he met her; he was 37, divorced and already a successful businessman. She was Miss Austria in a Miss Universe contest that Cavalli was judging alongside Vidal Sassoon. She came second in the contest, but began shooting a fashion campaign for Cavalli almost immediately. They have now been married for 27 years and, as the designer happily admits, she is the backbone of the company.

Cavalli takes full advantage of the time that gives him.

He loves riding. He enjoys entertaining on his yacht – friends such as Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Sting, Bono, the occasional Russian oligarch and Saudi princeling, and, of course, Victoria Beckham, who once modelled in one of his shows, although, as she elegantly admitted afterwards, she was “cacking herself”.

At 67, Cavalli knows who he is and what he wants.

He much prefers people in the music scene to those in fashion, claiming they are warmer and more creative.

He rejects modern religion as little more than a branch of politics. And he generally likes animals more than people, cutting short his London trip because a new baby monkey had been delivered to his farm in Tuscany and he couldn’t wait to see it.

He still remembers his ex-wife fondly. “I loved her so much,” he says, smiling. “She made me feel so strong and confident that my stutter disappeared. Our first child was born exactly nine months and 10 days after we were married. In those days, sex wasn’t a porno movie, like now. It was more sophisticated and loving. Of course, sex is important to me, but it’s not as important as love. Love is central. I have never been homosexual, and I never could be. What I love most is the amazingly soft skin of a woman. She doesn’t even have to be naked to excite me.”

He warms to his subject. “I give in to my emotions all the time. I cry easily, whether at a movie [his favourite is Bergman’s Wild Strawberries], music [he loves Mozart] or vulnerable young animals, and I could never trust anyone who didn’t do the same.”

Sinatra’s My Way could have been written as Cavalli’s life song. And, yes, he has a few regrets – “I am now so ashamed of how bad a teenager I was, and how much I upset my poor mother” – but on the whole he is a man well content.