Rosita Missoni obituary

Rosita Missoni, who has died aged 93, came out of the historic heartland of Italian textiles in northern Lombardy, and though she travelled worldwide for decades and the Missoni fashion and decor brand became famous globally, she remained devoted to her native terroir. All the artistic, artisanal, and ever-inventive technological skills that sustained the company’s success over 70 years were as much part of the locality as its mountains and lakes.

The other company founder, her husband, Ottavio (Tai) Missoni, was originally from the shores of the Adriatic, but was working in knits, and on marriage migrated to her territory. Theirs was a union of complementary talents – Tai was an artist of great colour gifts who choreographed how yarns should be fed into which machine to knit what pattern, while she shaped the firm’s overall fashion direction and uses of the output.

Rosita’s grandmother and mother had been commanding powers in their family factory, Torrani and Jelmini, established in 1921 in the town of Golasecca, specialising in embroidered fine lingerie, and machine-knit accessories, especially shawls.

Rosita experimented with scraps from babyhood, always aware of the interplay of colour, cloth, technology and fashion. In 1953, the newly married Missonis set up their own small machine-knitwear workshop, Maglificio Jolly, in nearby Gallarate. This was part of a postwar Italian movement that put together centuries-old knowledge of materials with sophisticated machinery developments (originally funded by American Marshall Plan money to revive European industry) and a new preference for informal, ready-to-wear clothes.

At first their few machines could manage only three-colour-stripe garments for other labels. By 1955, a Milan boutique stocked Maglificio Jolly; in 1958, Milan’s grand department store La Rinascente bought a collection of stripes of many colours, labelled “Missoni”. Tai and Rosita’s pattern repertoire expanded with each new machine from horizontal stripes to vertical, tartans to jacquard repeats.

The signature chevrons arrived in 1962 when they discovered an update of the more-than-century-old Raschel machines: Rosita remembered how her grandparents had used similar to knit silky shawls echoing antique flamestitch embroidery, the kind of shawls, she said, “you would throw over a lampshade”. Bolder Missoni versions were suited to the craze for geometrical pattern early in the 1960s, and Missoni was enthusiastically promoted by Anna Piaggi of Italian Vogue and Diana Vreeland in US.

By 1967, the Missonis had outlets in New York and Paris, and their own boutique in Milan; they presented collections in clever shows in interesting spaces – a theatre, a swimming pool – around the city. They helped shove the focus of Italian fashion from crusty Florence and snooty Rome to artisan Milan, where it remains.

The next decade brought the Missoni’s best years. First came an art deco revival – thanks to Rosita’s memories, the Missoni deco designs were affectionate but not pastiche. Then fashion hankered for handmade craftwork, mostly knitted goods, and welcomed Missoni machine-knits because of their related aesthetic heritage.

And then, as more people flew internationally and observed the ways other cultures dressed, designers such as Kenzo Takada and Bill Gibb experimented with outfits assembled from knitted, printed, embroidered and woven textiles, with geometric and floral patterns, all worn at once.

The Missonis could supply everything. Rosita regularly went on collecting trips to places where clothes, ceramics and furniture were still happily handmade, or rose early in cities across Europe to truffle for fleamarket finds. She wanted Missoni design to be part of a worldscape of decoration, and she hated waste – the appeal of knitting was that it wasted less yarn than cut and sewn cloth. She reclaimed workshop scraps for patchwork and rugs for their home. In 1978, the Missonis showed their collection at their quarter-century retrospective in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Their work was at home there.

Born in Golasecca, Rosita was the daughter of Diamante and Angelo Jelmini, who both worked for the family firm; she had two brothers, Alberto and Giampiero. Besides her factory-floor education, she had been sent away to school on the Ligurian coast, for her health, and then to London in 1948 to learn English, supervised by Swiss nuns.

The sisters took their students to Wembley Stadium to witness track events in the summer Olympics, and there Rosita spotted handsome Tai, a decade older, competing in the Italian hurdles and relay team. They eventually arranged a proper meeting by the Eros statue in Piccadilly. Back home in Italy, Tai, who was designing knitted tracksuits – he later made the Italian uniforms for the 1952 Olympics – courted her. Their families approved, and the pair married in 1953.

Rosita and Tai decided in their first, late 60s, flush of success that they were artisan producers and wanted to stay as such, with a full life right beside their joint work. They commissioned from the architect Enrico Buzzi a factory and nearby home with a view of the Alps in Sumirago, under 10km from Golasecca, among gardens that grew produce and plumped hens to be cooked for their children, Luca, Vittorio and Angela.

All three grew up to work in the firm. Luca became menswear designer, Vittorio the marketer, and Angela, after adventures elsewhere, took over from her parents as head of design in 1996.

That freed Rosita, who felt she had nothing more to contribute to fashion (although her own magpie style stayed imaginative to the end), to be creative director of the Missoni home line, which maintained a steady customer appeal while the clothes had periods out of – the 80s – and in – the 2000s – favour in fashion.

Her decor ideas drew on her lifetime collecting, and the personal pleasure she and Tai had in the constant making of things for their Sumirago home.

Tai died in 2013, not long after Vittorio was killed in a plane crash. Rosita is survived by Luca and Angela (who passed a senior design role to her daughter, Margherita), and by eight more grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, and by Alberto.