Rosita Missoni, Matriarch of the Missoni Fashion Family, Has Died
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 Missoni 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 runways every year, revised and revisited again and again, without ever going out of fashion.
But Missoni, who just passed away at the age of ninety-three, 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 recognized 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 Missoni, a woman 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 on the shoulder like a colorful 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 Missoni, 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: Missoni 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, Missoni was always a lover of colors. 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 recognizable, 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. In the meantime, Missoni has remained steadfast, her time always divided between work and the garden, which is also as colorful as her clothes, a reminder of Liguria in Lombardy.
From the house in Sumirago, on the wooded hills behind Milan where Missoni 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, Missoni was keen to point out: “But my real place is in the office.”
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