What Roberto Cavalli Taught Me About the Patriarchy

Everyone who knows me knows about the bag.

The brown Roberto Cavalli shoulder bag with a (very bratty) hot-pink interior. The outside is covered with metallic buckles, small ornamental traps that immediately caught my eye when I first saw this (very) unique accessory. I found it last year in a vintage shop in Le Marais that I entered casually, mostly because my friend Bruna and I needed a break from the unbearable February cold of Paris. I made the purchase proudly (encouraged by Bruna, who declared the bag was “extremely Maddalena-coded”) and carried it home like a trophy.

Since then, the bag has become something like a companion. It has seen me through the unglamorous reality of girlhood: running late, running scared, running out of patience.

When I moved to London, the bag obviously came too.

I began carrying it everywhere: to class, to the grocery store, on the Tube. The Underground has very much become my private sociological observation project: a moving exhibit of London’s compressed humanity (that I religiously debrief with my friend Aleksandra). Every morning I board the train, on my way from Finsbury Park to Holborn, with hundreds of strangers, each pretending to be alone. The Tube is where people cry quietly, eat sandwiches at inappropriate times, scroll through lives they wish were theirs. The air is thick with fatigue and the quiet hysteria of too many thoughts contained in too little space. I find a kind of dark humor in it: this mechanical intimacy, this forced proximity among people who’d rather be anywhere else. I've often thought about it like a theatre where no one really wants to perform.

One morning, I became the spectacle.

It was early, the carriage half-empty, the light the color of old metal. I was standing near the door, listening to a playlist titled Frazzled English Woman. At Caledonian Road, the doors opened, and a man in his fifties stepped in. He looked ordinary, tired: one of those faces that seem permanently angry at something invisible. Without hesitation, he walked straight into me. His coat sleeve snagged on one of the bag’s metal buckles, and for a brief moment we were caught together; two strangers physically bound by accident.

He didn’t say sorry (like a normal person would; or at least like i would have). He instead proceeded to scream at me.

“Stupid bitch” he said.

It was so sudden I thought I had misheard. Then he said it again, louder, with a weird kind of theatrical rage. The words came out with the force of something loooooong rehearsed. I stood there, confused, and managed to say, very formally, “Sir, YOU walked into ME.”

He didn’t stop. He shouted about women who were always on their phones, always taking up space, always unaware of the world around them. He called me stupid again. Then he left the carriage, but not before turning around and screaming one last insult: “Stupid slut.”

When he disappeared, the sound of his voice lingered in the air like a bad smell. The other passengers pretended to look elsewhere. A woman across from me (middle-aged, kind face) asked softly if I was all right. I said yes. But I wasn’t. I felt my throat tighten, that familiar paralysis that comes when fear and disbelief collide.

For the rest of the day, I couldn’t stop replaying the moment. Not because of the insult itself: women are insulted every day, everywhere, but because of how ordinary it all was. Looking back at it, I think the man’s rage wasn’t unusual; it was archetypal. It had the weight of something historical, inherited, very much systemic. It was, I realized, a distilled performance of patriarchy in its most banal form: a man’s need to displace his unhappiness onto the nearest woman.

It would be easy to call it an act of misogyny, and it was, but that word feels almost too clinical for what I experienced. I think it's reductive to say it was "just" some gendered hatred; it was a transaction of misery.

He didn’t see me.

He saw a shape that could absorb him. He saw a surface smooth enough to reflect his own failure without returning it. He saw someone who wouldn’t fight back. That really is how patriarchy operates most effectively: through habitual permissions to treat women as extensions of male frustration.

Later that week, when I had recovered enough to think rather than just feel, I remembered something absurd: Barney Stinson’s Chain of Screaming theory from How I Met Your Mother. The idea that rage moves downward through hierarchies, from boss to employee, parent to child, stranger to stranger, until it lands on the one person too powerless to pass it on. The man on the Tube, I realized, had simply found his place in the chain. He had probably been screamed at earlier, by someone with authority, or by life itself, who knows. The only way he knew to restore balance was to scream at someone below him, someone whose voice mattered even less.

That morning, he saw me at the bottom of the chain.

What fascinated me, more than frightened me, was how efficient the mechanism was. How easily violence can travel through language. The more I thought about it, the more I saw that his rage wasn’t really power but shame in disguise. Patriarchy feeds on male shame, on men’s terror of their own vulnerability. When that shame becomes unbearable, it seeks an exit, and women are the designated emergency door.

I don’t think he hated me, how could he? He has no idea of how intense I can be about how I want my chai latte in the morning or how annoyingly long I take to get ready to go out at night.

He didn't know me at all and that's why I think he needed me to carry the part of himself he couldn’t stand.

In the days that followed, I felt an odd form of pity for him. He was performing the only version of masculinity he knew: the kind that equates violence with control. He had been trained, as so many men are, to externalize pain, to make someone else smaller rather than face the emptiness within.

I, on the other hand, had been trained to internalize it. To smile, to stay calm, to shrink the damage until it fit inside my ribs.

But that morning changed something in me. I decided I would no longer participate in the ritual. I would not continue the chain of screaming. I would not become the next transmitter of inherited rage. I refused to absorb.

When I got home, I hung the Cavalli bag on the back of a chair and stared at it. It looked the same but I couldn’t unsee what that bag had witnessed. That thing, that exaggerated, flashy, unapologetically feminine object, had become something symbolic. I thought about how femininity itself is often treated as provocation, as if softness and color and beauty were personal attacks against a world that values violent control above all else. Maybe that’s what Roberto Cavalli taught me about the patriarchy, unintentionally. That the feminine exposes the fragility of the masculine. That a pink interior can, in certain lights, fight against sexist aggressions.

The next morning, I took the same train.

Same carriage, same bag. I looked around at the commuters; the tired men, the women holding their keys like weapons, the endless faces sunk in digital solitude. I thought of how many small aggressions happen every day, invisible, unrecorded, dismissed. Each one a fragment of a structure too old to name. I thought of how miserable one’s life must be, to spend energy actively trying to hurt someone. I thought how fragile the whole performance of power is.

I guess we are all just trying not to be at the bottom of the chain.

But someone has to break it.

And that morning, I like to think that I did.