From left: Eugenio Amos, Margherita Amos, Francesco Maccapani, Rosita Missoni, Angela Missoni and Teresa Maccapani arrive at the Fashion Group International award dinner in New York, Oct 22, 2013. Photo: The New York Times
Rosita Missoni, who, with her husband, Ottavio, built a luxury clothing brand on a foundation of boldly colourful striped and zigzagged knitwear that helped make Milan a capital of Italian high fashion, died Wednesday (Jan 1) at her home in Sumirago, in northern Italy. She was 93.
Her death was confirmed Thursday (Jan 2) by Angela Mariani, communications consultant for Missoni.
What began in 1953 as a homespun venture for the Missonis was transformed in just a couple of decades into a leading fashion house with one of the world’s most recognisable brands.
If Emilio Pucci’s bold swirls helped define Italian fashion in the 1950s and 60s, Missoni’s squiggly, striped and multicoloured space-dyed designs marked the 70s.
Bernadine Morris, a fashion critic for The New York Times, called the label’s knitted garments international status symbols, writing in 1979 that the Missonis “have elevated knitted clothes to a form of art”.
At first, the Missonis sold their sweaters anonymously or under co-labels with known designers, including Emmanuelle Khanh and Christiane Bailly.
Rosita eventually took over the design of the silhouettes, and Ottavio handled the patterns: space dyes, stripes, squiggles, chevrons, all in vivid colours.
Five years after the company’s founding, Missoni dresses could be purchased at La Rinascente, an upscale department store in Milan.
Anna Piaggi, editor of Vogue Italia, had Missoni designs photographed for an editorial shoot published in 1965. The family business had become a high-fashion brand.
Missoni’s first runway shows were held in Milan in 1966. A semiannual fashion week had taken place there since 1958, but Florence and Rome were still the premier locations for “alta moda” presentations.
The Missonis showed their ready-to-wear collections in imaginative environments in Milan, first at a historic theatre, Teatro Gerolamo, with the assistance of spatial artist Lucio Fontana, and then at a well-known public swimming pool, Piscina Solari, where models floated on inflatable furniture designed by Quasar Khanh.
Missoni shows – part-collection, part-performance art – were a precursor to the Instagrammable runway spectacles of the 2010s and, over time, made Milan a destination for fashion critics from around the world.
The couple showed their next collection in Florence, at the Palazzo Pitti.
Backstage, when Rosita saw her models in the thin knit dresses that she and her husband had conceived, she asked them to remove their bras, which were showing through the fabric.
What she hadn’t considered was how the stage lights would affect the transparency of the garments; the scandalous see-through dresses became the talk of the town, and the Missonis were not asked to show in Florence again.
So they returned to showing in Milan. Missoni’s presence on the calendar drew other northern Italian knitwear brands, whose factories had been renovated in the 1950s with money from the Marshall Plan.
By then the Missonis had captivated the US fashion press.
Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, featured Missoni in a 1969 spread – a major endorsement for the company and proof that colourful sweaters could be as viable an artform as couture gowns.
Later that year, the couple built a factory in Sumirago, in view of the Italian Alps. Architect Enrico Buzzi designed the factory and built for the Missonis a relatively modest stucco house nearby.
The Missoni house was filled with Rosita’s collectibles: baskets, shells, shards of coloured glass and other flea-market finds.
An informal dining room was often filled with guests, who feasted on meals using produce from Rosita’s garden.
Entering the 1990s, the Missonis took steps to hand the company over to their children, putting sons Vittorio and Luca in charge of the business side and installing daughter Angela as head of design.
Angela set the company up for growth in multiple business categories, establishing more than 20 sub-brands, including a lower-price label; a home decor line led by Rosita; and a now-shuttered hotel chain.
Under Angela’s creative leadership, the brand has dressed stars such as Kerry Washington, Regina King, Cate Blanchett and Beyonce, as well as Melania Trump.
Rosita was born into a textile-manufacturing family Nov 20, 1931, in Golasecca, in northern Lombardy, near Lake Maggiore.
Like her grandparents before them, her parents, Diamante and Angelo Jelmini, worked in the family factory, where Rosita spent much of her youth absorbing techniques and aesthetics, including the colourful zigzags that would become a Missoni signature.
“There among the fabric and the patterns, I learned all about 1930s fashion, cutting it out in silhouettes,” she told T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2017.
The first sweater she designed was made using material from the factory.
Rosita, who grew up with two brothers, Alberto and Giampiero, was a sickly child. Her parents sent her away to school on the Ligurian coast, hoping the change of scenery would improve her health. Living on a Mediterranean diet near the sea and engaging with the school’s “marvelous garden” seemed to help.
Rosita met Ottavio, known to his friends as Tai, in 1948.
She was a student in London studying English, and he was a hurdler with the Italian track-and-field team competing in the Summer Olympics there.
They first saw each other near the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in Piccadilly Circus. At the top of the fountain is a statue of Anteros, the god of requited love.
The couple wed April 18, 1953, and began renting their first factory, in Gallarate, outside Milan, the same year.
“From the day we got married, we knew we would be in business together,” Rosita told the Times in 1978.
Ottavio had graduated from athlete to designer, fashioning uniforms for the Italian team before the 1952 Olympics.
Ottavio died at 92 in May 2013, just a few months after their son Vittorio was killed in a plane crash.
Rosita is survived by her two other children, as well as her brother Alberto, nine grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. – ©2024 The New York Times Company
