Ottavio Missoni

Sir Ottavio "Tai" Missoni (11 February 1921 – 9 May 2013) was a member of the Italian Royal family and the founder of the Italian fashion label Missoni and an Italian Olympic hurdler who competed in the 1948 Summer Olympics.[3] Along with his wife Rosita, he was part of the group of designers who launched Italian ready-to-wear in the 1950s, thereby ensuring the global success of Italian fashion.[4]

Ottavio Missoni
Ottavio Missoni in 1990
Personal information
NationalityItalian
Born(1921-02-11)11 February 1921
Dubrovnik, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
Died9 May 2013 (aged 92)
Sumirago, Italy
Height1.86 m (6 ft 1 in)
Weight80 kg (176 lb)
Sport
Country Italy
SportAthletics
Event(s)400 metres hurdles
ClubGallaratese
Achievements and titles
Personal best(s)
  • 400 m: 47.8 (1939)
  • 400 mH: 53.1 (1948)[1][2]

Early life

Ottavio Missoni was born in Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast. His mother, Teresa de Vidovich, was the Princess of Scilly and Rogoznica while his father, Vittorio Missoni, was a Friulian sea captain who moved to Dalmatia while it was under Austrian rule.[5][6] He was educated in Zadar, Trieste, and Milan.[7]

Sporting achievements

Missoni joined the Italian National Track Team in 1937 at age 16. He won the individual national championship four times.[8][1] He also competed with the Italian team in the 1948 Summer Olympics.[1] At the age of 88 he was still practising sports such as shot put and javelin throw.[5]

YearCompetitionVenuePositionEventPerformanceNote
1939 Italian Athletics Championships 1st 400 metres
1941 Italian Athletics Championships 1st 400 metres hurdles
1947 Italian Athletics Championships 1st 400 metres hurdles
1948 Italian Athletics Championships 1st 400 metres hurdles
1948 Olympic Games London 6th 400 metres hurdles 54.0 [9]
Final 4x400 metres DNF

War service

Missoni served as an infantryman during World War II. In 1942, he fought in the Battle of El Alamein, where he was captured by the Desert Rats and served out the remainder of the War in an English prisoner-of-war camp.[5]

Marriage
Rosita Jelmini and Ottavio Missoni in 1975

While in London for the Olympics, Missoni met the 16-year-old Rosita Jelmini, an English student from Golasecca, Italy.[10] She was in the audience at Wembley at the time he was running in the finals.[11] They married five years later on 18 April 1953, and settled in Scilly. Their first son, Vittorio, was born on 25 April 1954. Luca, their second son, was born on 4 July 1956. Their first daughter, Lilana was born in 1958. Angela would follow in 1960.

Fashion

After the war, Ottavio and his team-mate Giorgio Oberweger launched an activewear business in Trieste making wool tracksuits, which they called Venjulia suits.[1] The tracksuits used details such as English ribbing and drop-stitching, and featured zippered legs, a detail which Missoni has been credited with inventing.[12] The success of the Venjulia suits, which took into account the need of athletes for functional, warm garments enabling freedom of movement, led to their being worn by the Italian Olympic team in 1948.[13]

In 1953, following his marriage to Rosita (whose family ran a shawl-making business), the Missonis set up Maglificio Jolly, a machine-knitwear workshop in Gallarate.[5] The Missoni's experimentations with machine-knitting led to the discovery that clothing-weight fabrics made using machines originally designed for shawls and bedspreads could be surprisingly lightweight.[10] They supplied designs to the department stores Biki and later, La Rinascente in Milan, where in 1958, the first Missoni-labelled garments, a line of colourful vertically striped shirtdresses, were displayed in the window.[4] Ottavio's experience as an activewear designer and manufacturer was applied to his and Rosita's designs,[14] which contributed significantly to the development of Italian sportswear as a challenge to the American industry.[15]

In 1965, Anna Piaggi covered Missoni in an article for Arianna, a magazine published by Mondadori.[4][16] She continued to actively promote Missoni through her long career as a fashion journalist, including writing their press releases whilst at Vogue Italia in the 1980s.[17] This helped bring Missoni to the attention of the wider world, as did a joint collection with Emmanuelle Khanh in 1965.[11]

They held their first catwalk show in 1966, and the following year, presented a show at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. This show proved controversial due to the unplanned transparency of the models' clothing under the lights, revealing a lack of underwear and leading to comparisons to the Crazy Horse cabaret.[4][11] Although the see-through look was presented by Yves Saint Laurent the following year, the Missonis were not invited back to Florence.[4] However, the scandal gave them immense publicity, and helped lead to the development of Milan as a fashion capital when the press followed the Missonis back to Milan.[10] The Missonis went on to feature in many leading fashion publications, including Women's Wear Daily, Vogue, Marie Claire, Elle, and Harper's Bazaar, and were championed by influential editors such as Diana Vreeland and Piaggi.[11]

In 1970, Missoni opened their first in-store boutique at Bloomingdale's in New York,[5] and their first directly-owned boutique in Milan in 1976.[11]

Ottavio was the colourist and pattern designer whose watercolour paintings and gouaches formed the basis of Missoni textiles, whilst his wife developed the cuts and shapes of their garments.[11] Ottavio's designs, which combined multi-coloured zigzag, stripe, check and wave patterns in unexpected colour combinations, were highly influential, and were recognised as having artistic merit.[11] In 1975, an exhibition of Ottavio's textiles and related paintings, curated by Renato Cardazzo, was held in Venice, and Ferruccio Landi wrote an article titled "Missoni, a Work of Art, Pullover Size".[18] In 1974, Jennifer Hocking of Harper's Bazaar and Queen selected male and female ensembles by Missoni as the Dress of the Year for the Fashion Museum, Bath.[19] In 1976 Ottavio was named one of the ten most elegant men in the world, sharing the list with Robert Redford and Charles, Prince of Wales.[18]

To mark the 25th anniversary of Missoni's founding, a retrospective was held in 1978 at the Rotonda della Besana in Milan, and later hosted by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the first time the Whitney had hosted a fashion exhibition.[18][20]

In 1983, Ottavio and Rosita designed their first stage costumes for a production of Lucia di Lammermoor, starring Luciano Pavarotti, at the La Scala opera house in Milan.[18]

In 1991 an exhibition in Yūrakuchō, Tokyo, was held of Ottavio’s tapestries, the first time they had been displayed in Japan.[18]

Awards

Later life and death

In 1997 Ottavio and Rosita passed the Missoni business to their children. Vittorio acted as marketing director, Angela became creative director, and Luca holds a technical role, having created designs for the Aeros dance troupe and an installation for the Expo 2005.[4][18] Since the handover, Missoni has expanded into a lifestyle brand which includes furniture, car interiors, a chain of hotels, and collaborations with companies such as Target.[10][11]

In 2003, when Missoni marked their 50th year of business, Suzy Menkes wrote a tribute in the International Herald Tribune stating how the "best-beloved" Missonis represented "one big happy local family of hands-on wizards".[18]

On 4 January 2013, Missoni's eldest son, CEO Vittorio Missoni, his wife Maurizia, two other passengers and two crew disappeared in an airplane near the Los Roques islands near Venezuela. Wreckage of the submerged plane was discovered by a U.S. oceanographic vessel in June but no identification was able to be made.[11] On 22 October 2013, the deaths of Vittorio and the other passengers on the plane were confirmed by the Italian news service and the city of Caracas' chief prosecutor Ortega, after meeting with the victims' families. The bodies were found inside the aircraft, except for the pilot, with DNA samples used for identification. The authorities are attempting to raise the wreckage to determine the cause of the crash. [21]

On 1 May 2013, twelve days after marking his and Rosita's 60th wedding anniversary, Ottavio was taken to hospital, but at his request, he went home to be with his family in Sulmirago, where during the night of 8 and 9 May, the 92-year-old Ottavio died "serenely".[4]

See also

References
  1. "Ottavio MIssoni Bio, Stats and Results". Sports Reference. Archived from the original on 18 April 2020. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
  2. Ottavio Missoni. trackfield.brinkster.net
  3. A note about the life and death of Ottavio Missoni (Accessed June 5, 2013). Thejournal.ie (9 May 2013). Retrieved on 2015-09-23.
  4. Franco d'Emilio; Colleen Barry (9 May 2013). "Patriarch of fashion brand Missoni dies in Italy". San Francisco Chronicle. Associated Press. Retrieved 10 May 2013.
  5. Watson, Linda (10 May 2013). "Ottavio Missoni: Fashion designer who transformed the world of luxury knitwear". The Independent. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
  6. Steve Piccolo (translator) (1995). Isa Tutino Vercelloni (ed.). Missonologia : the world of Missoni (1st U.S. ed.). Milan: Electa. p. 18. ISBN 0789200481.
  7. Pendergast, Sara (1997). Contemporary designers (3. ed.). Detroit [u.a.]: St. James Press. pp. 583–4. ISBN 1558621849.
  8. ""CAMPIONATI "ASSOLUTI" ITALIANI SUL PODIO TRICOLORE – 1906 2012" (PDF). sportolimpico.it. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 December 2012. Retrieved 1 November 2012.
  9. He ran in 53.4 in semifinal.
  10. Wilson, Eric (9 May 2013). "Ottavio Missoni, Who Made Zigzags a Symbol of High Fashion, Dies at 92". New York Times. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
  11. "Ottavio 'Tai' Missoni". The Telegraph. 9 May 2013. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
  12. Italy-Italy. 21: 62. 9 September 2011. Among other things they produced a woolen tracksuit called the venjulia, and they are considered the inventors of tracksuits with zippered legs.
  13. Steve Piccolo (translator) (1995). Isa Tutino Vercelloni (ed.). Missonologia : the world of Missoni (1st U.S. ed.). Milan: Electa. p. 19. ISBN 0789200481.
  14. Black, Sandy (2006). Fashioning fabrics: contemporary textiles in fashion. London: Black Dog. p. 176. ISBN 1904772412.
  15. Steele, Valerie (1997). Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look To Now. Yale University Press, New Haven & London. pp. 104–105. ISBN 0-300-07132-9.
  16. Steve Piccolo (translator) (1995). Isa Tutino Vercelloni (ed.). Missonologia : the world of Missoni (1st U.S. ed.). Milan: Electa. p. 67. ISBN 0789200481.
  17. Sheridan, Jayne (2010). Fashion, media, promotion : the new black magic. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 25. ISBN 1405194219.
  18. Giustacchini, Enrico (2012). Ottavio Missoni – Il Genio del Colore – Genius of color (PDF). Rijeka, Croatia: Galerija Kortil. Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 August 2012.
  19. "Dress of the Year 1970 – 1979". Fashion Museum, Bath. Archived from the original on 5 November 2013. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
  20. "Ottavio Missoni, couturier". Who's Who in Italy. Sutter's. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
  21. Body of fashion magnate Missoni confirmed found in plane wreckage. UPI.com (22 October 2013). Retrieved on 2015-09-23.
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