Rosita Missoni, matriarch of the Missoni family, dies aged 93
Rosita Jelmini Missoni and her husband Ottavio (Tai) were invited to show their clothes to the general fashion public for the first time in 1967. The backdrop was the Pitti Palace in Florence, and the group at the show was made up of members of the press, industry insiders, buyers and clients.
It was an important debut; everything had to fit perfectly. But Rosita didn't like the way the models' dark underwear appeared under the light, transparent fabrics. To solve the problem, she asked them to walk the runway without underwear, thinking it wouldn't be noticed under the lights. This was the beginning of the nude look, the same one that, in the same period of time, was being tested at the home of Yves Saint Laurent — the same one that today parades on the catwalks every year, revised again and again, without ever going out of fashion.
But the designer, who died this week at the age of 93, was too far ahead of her time. "It was a big scandal: they said we were transforming the fashion shows into the Crazy Horse," she said, referencing the Parisian cabaret known for its highly erotic shows.
The following season, the Missonis were not called back to Florence, but in the meantime, the nude look was already making its way onto the runways. The garments were noticed overseas however, and were highly requested by the department stores in New York, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles. Finally, six years later, Florence recognised their genius; Italy has not abandoned them since.
This is an anecdote that bears witness to just one of the many innovations brought to fashion by Rosita, an entrepreneur who lived and breathed "made in Italy” when Italian entrepreneurship was still struggling to accept women in the fashion business. She was creative in a way that few before her have ever been, and few after her will ever be.
Short hair and a braid that started from the nape of the neck and fell over the shoulder like a colourful charm, closed with a pretty ribbon. A pair of glasses elongated at the sides. Soft garments, never monochromatic. This was the look that we have come to associate with Rosita, matriarch and co-founder of the historic fashion house that bears the family name. A way of appearing — and being — that should not surprise anyone: this was the woman who transformed knitwear into applied art, into elevated fashion, precisely because it was handmade.
She was the woman behind the all-Italian invention of "the put-together," the apparently casual interweaving of patterns, polka dots and stripes that is emblematic of the Missoni house alongside its zigzag and patchwork. She was also the woman behind the "flam" motif, conceived in the 1960s by using a cutting-edge machine and old bits of fabric taken from her grandparents' shawl and linen factory. These were the inventions that pushed her husband to participate in her creativity, giving life to new ideas and motifs that, from the laboratory in the basement of their home in the northern Italian city of Gallarate, took them to the windows of the Rinascente in Milan and then, from there, into the world.
Born in 1931 in the Italian province of Varese, Rosita was always a champion of colour. She was a sickly child, and so her parents sent her to school in Liguria, hoping she would be strengthened by the sea, the greenery, and the flowers of the coast. When she was a teenager, she went to her grandparents' textile company every day, making paper dolls with the pages of glossy magazines, then cutting out the shapes of her first creations on pieces of leftover fabric. As an adult, she tried designing with tweed and boiled wool, typically rendered in African abstract designs, and Anglo-Saxon applied arts, in a mix that was always recognisable, always beautiful. In 1972, the New York Times wrote, "The Missonis make the best knitwear in the world and, according to some, the most beautiful fashion in the world."
Since then, not much has changed. There has been expansion and evolution, recognition, and births: a second and third Missoni generation. Throughout, Rosita remained steadfast, her time always divided between work and the garden, which was as colourful as her clothes – a reminder of Liguria in Lombardy.
From the house in Sumirago, on the wooded hills behind Milan where Rosita gave one of her last interviews for the New York Times, the company's factory was clearly visible beyond the bunches of cucumbers, garlic shoots and yellow marigolds — like a continuum of that beautiful garden. In fact, at the end of the interview, she was keen to point out: “But my real place is in the office.”
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