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R.I.P. Ottavio Missoni, great master of Italian design

Missoni's fashion

Missoni’s fashion

Italian design is well ranked worldwide among the most innovative and creative. That’s why La Mercanti, specialising in design office furniture from Italy, wants to thank hereby a master in Italian design. Italian fashion designer Ottavio Missoni, a master of color and style, just died. Known to all as Tai Missoni, he was the man who revolutionized fashion, and not only the Italian one, who has dared bringing new patterns and colors on the catwalks, who has captured the world with its yarns. Death took him away on May 9th, 2013; he was 92, born in 1921 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

The encounter that will forever change the history of fashion takes place in London: there Ottavio Missoni met Rosita Jelmini, the woman who would later become his wife. Together, they open a first small textile workshop in Gallarate, near Milan, but from that moment on, his life changes radically. In 1950, he founded the Italian fashion house, in the seventies its success is known worldwide. Makes it popular with a scandal in 1967, in the Palazzo Pitti, his models parading without underwear and under the lights appear naked bodies to the public.

Missoni was a free spirit, who managed to introduce innovation, a craftsman who creates something brilliant and unique from nothing, an artist of color, who for the first time has approached nuances that nobody had dared. His geometric lines, his abstract patterns, have conquered the fashion market. His style is that of the “put together”, pulling colors and shades, forming a veritable kaleidoscope of fantasies. And the colors he chose were not random, but wer born from his life.

In the biography he wrote, «from Dalmatia and Dubrovnik I brought with me the blues, that smell overseas, orange and red sunsets over the Adriatic, the warm yellow ocher and brown flecked speak of rocks and sand, lapped, reshuffled and eroded by the waves. Cannot miss the blacks, which blend. And then the purple, my favorite color, in all its nuances. If it looks good, it’s always there, even if it appears at first sight. “

Her fashion has been continuous research and exploration, ingenuity and hard work, elegance and simplicity. His works of art most times have been exhibited in major museums. His unique style, the plot of the simple yarn, the seemingly random juxtaposition of different colors, gave him the opportunity to enter the history of fashion. A lifetime of success but, he’s never moved away from his family. Beside him he has always held his wife and three children, Angela, Vittorio and Luca.