Rosita Missoni passed away on January 2, 2025, at her legendary residence in Sumirago. Born Nov. 20, 1931, in Golasecca, in the province of Varese, Rosita Jelmini Missoni was the last heir of a family of Lombard textile artisans: the Torrani family. Her life knew a turning point thanks to her meeting Ottavio Missoni, a young athlete at the 1948 London Olympics, whom she married on April 18, 1953.

Rosita and Ottavio created a company that immediately distinguished itself by a strong aptitude for innovation and an irrepressible vocation for breaking the mould. The new enterprise starts out by experimenting with an unprecedented use of machines designed for shawl making, which are used to create an original meter knit, cut like a fabric and used for ready-to-wear with surprisingly new textures and colors.

In 1966 came the first real fashion show, at the Teatro Girolamo in Milan; in 1967 a show at the Palazzo Pitti received strong criticism, because of the unsettling nude-look of the models on the runway, who wore no bra under the lamé knitwear. The episode probably has its own relevance with regard to the fact that the Missoni brand does not get its first major awards in Italy, but abroad.

Particularly intense, deep, productive and vital has been the relationship between the Maison and the United States. In 1971 Bernardine Morris, in the pages of the “New York Times,” called Missoni's “the best knitwear in the world.” The Los Angeles Times, in 1972, presents the Missoni couple as “The New Status Symbol of Italian Design.” Diana Vreeland, the historic director of Vogue, in the same years brings them straight from Bloomingdale's, New York, while expressions of appreciation multiply in the media.

The Missoni brand, among the great champions of Made in Italy in the World, was the one that sank its roots most deeply into an innovative and unexplored contamination between Fashion and Design. The famous workmanship of the house called “Put Together,” probably the highest and most emblematic expression of an unrepeatable style, was born precisely in an ideal and unexplored point of intersection between Design and Fashion. The “Put Together,” in fact, consists of a highly original and unmistakable overlapping of colors, dots and patterns, which-thanks also to a skillful use of fabrics and prints-has become a true trademark. These ingenious plays of hues and geometries, these authentic chromatic explosions, this kaleidoscope of nuances and precious textures, have opened new chapters in the history of Fashion and Design, making the Missoni style inimitable.

The brand has always had a particularly fruitful and intense relationship with the world of Art. Let us recall, by way of example, the 2015 exhibition at the MAGA Museum in Gallarate, “Missoni, Art, Color,” which Luca Missoni curated together with Emma Zanella, director of the museum, and Luciano Caramel, critic and professor of art history. The exhibition expressed a sensory journey among more than one hundred works by European artists, from the early twentieth century, with whom Ottavio and Rosita were confronted in their long cultural, creative and artistic journey.

The following year the exhibition was then mounted at the “Fashion and Textile Museum” in London where it was a great success with critics and the public. Again the MAGA in Gallarate, in 2021, presented the new installation of the Ottavio Missoni Tapestry Room, which has become a permanent part of the collection, and which preserves a series of large tapestries made of knitted fabric patchwork, set up in a space imagined by Luca Missoni and designed by Angelo Jelmini.

The Maison over the years has developed its all-round artistic expressions, also collaborating with the world of Theater and Dance. It was in 1983 that Rosita and Ottavio Missoni made their debut at Teatro alla Scala in Milan as costume designers in Lucia di Lammermoor, directed by Pier Luigi Pizzi and featuring the voices of Luciano Pavarotti and Luciana Serra. David Parsons, one of the world's most acclaimed American Contemporary Dance choreographers and dancers, commissioned Missoni to design costumes for the “David Parsons Dance Company” in 1994.

Rosita, then, has always had a particularly close personal relationship of her own with the field of Design. When, in 2009, the first Hotel Missoni opened in Edinburgh, under license with Redizor, she was in charge of its Design, in collaboration with architect Matteo Thun.

The designer, once she left the creative direction of the clothing line, significantly dedicated herself full-time to the Missoni Home collection, focusing on a peculiar “home” declination of the brand.

Rosita thus somehow wanted to celebrate the historic contamination, typical of the Missoni brand, between Fashion and Design, declining her original and colorful language in objects, furnishing accessories and fabrics, playing with the iconic patterns of the Maison. Her relationship with the United States had a touching and recent testimony in her last interview with Corriere della Sera, when she recounted, “As a child, I used to cut out the stickers from the magazines that my uncle would get thanks to the maître di Golasecca returning from trips to America.”

Almost a zigzag life, Rosita's, like the most famous and typical pattern of her brand, between the two sides of the Atlantic, between Colors and Geometries, between Fashion and Design.