Italian designer Roberto Cavalli has chosen four top models to replace Kate Moss (right) in his new Fall/Winter 2008-09 ad campaign. The campaign, to be shot by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, is inspired by one of our favorite movies, Luchino Visconti's 1963 Il Gattopardo ("The Leopard), based on the book by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa. The movie, set in Sicily in the 1860s, stars Burt Lancaster as an Italian prince struggling to maintain a dying aristocracy, Alain Delon as his dashing nephew, and the beautiful Claudia Cardinale as Angelica, daughter of a rich former peasant who represents the new social order. Cavalli has chosen models Isabeli Fontana, Angela Lindvall, Raquel Zimmerman and Frankie Rayder to play the parts of Cardinale and the movie's other beauties in the ads.
"I've always been aesthetically fascinated by this film," Cavalli tells Women's Wear Daily. "I also find Il Gattopardo, a story that's based on the idea that 'the more it changes, the more it stays the same,' a good metaphor for fashion. In the campaign, the heroine - a sort of new Angelica - dances in the wilderness while a fire rages in the background; she represents the force of everything that is new, yet in the end she dresses like a romantic debutante." We think Fontana for one is perfectly cast as she bears an uncanny resemblance to Cardinale.
Gallery: Cavalli's Gattopardo Girls
Following Christie's' successful photo auction earlier this month where a nude of First Lady of France Carla Bruni 
Parties aren't easy on fashion. This past September Kate Moss wore a vintage Thirties Christian Dior gown to a party at the Victoria & Albert Museum in celebration of a new Dior exhibit, and although the dress wasn't exactly in new condition when she first put it on by the time the night was over it was practically in shreds. Somebody stepped on the satin at one point, causing a rip to appear up on the shoulder, and later in the evening a huge tear appeared across the back and another one almost directly over her butt. 
