Ottavio Missoni Dies at 92
Founder of the iconic Missoni brand, Ottavio Missoni, died yesterday at his home in Sumirago. He was 92. Missoni, known by his nickname Tai, founded the label with his wife Rosita.
Missoni was born in 1921 in Ragusa on the Dalmatian coast to Teresa De Vidovich, countess of Capocesto and Ragosniza, and Vittorio Missoni, a Sea captain.
Tai and Rosita married in 1953 in Golasecca and settled in Gallarate, both towns in Lombardy. They set up a small knitwear workshop they called Maglificio Jolly. There they introduced the groundbreaking brand and built their family business. They became known as "color geniuses" and were the first to create coordinating separates like a zigzag top with a polka dot skirt.
In 1962, the Missoni's debuted the zigzag motif. "We could only do stripes and then we started doing horizontal and vertical and little by little added more complicated stitches, plaids and jacquards," explained Rosita. "Then we found the Raschel machines that do the zigzag, and that was that. My grandparents had used them to make multicolored embroidered shawls with big rose patterns and long fringes, all hand knotted. The kind you throw over lampshades."
Then they opened their first boutique in 1967 in Milan and the brand scored its first fashion magazine cover, on Elle. "The seductively thin, silky sweaters of Missoni, no matter how many you own," Vogue wrote in March, "you always want more." That same year led to some scandal - the Missonis held a fashion show at Palazzo Pitti,Florence and Rosita sent braless models down the runway in lamé tops. Pitti to ban the house from showing until 1970.
That scandal didn't stop the company from rapidly expanding outside of Italy, selling in Paris for the first time in 1967 and, by the following year, in America. "We already sold to U.S department stores through Italian buying offices but it was Diana Vreeland who gave us a real helping hand," said Rosita Missoni.
Starting in 1996, Tai and Rosita gradually passed control of their fashion empire to their children Luca, Vittorio and Angela and handed the design responsibilities to their daughter. Their family is very tightly knit, no pun intended, and they suffered a huge blow earlier this year with the disappearance of Vittorio's plane off the coast of Venezeula.
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