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for sale a RARE "Missoni Fashions" Ottavio Missoni Hand Signed 10X8 Color Photo Todd Mueller COA.
February 1921 – 9 May 2013) was the founder of the Italian fashion label Missoni and in the 1948 Summer Olympics. in the 1950s,
thereby ensuring the global success of Italian
fashion. Ottavio Missoni was born in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on the Dalmatian coast.
His mother, Teresa de Vidovich, was a Croatian Countess and Rogoznica while
his father, Vittorio Missoni, was a Friulian sea
captain who moved to Dalmatia while it was under Austrian rule. He was the war, Ottavio and his an activewear business in Trieste they called Venjulia suits. The tracksuits used details such as English
ribbing and drop-stitching, and featured zippered legs,
a detail which Missoni has been credited with inventing. 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. In 1953, following his marriage to Rosita (whose
family ran a shawl-making business), the Missonis set up Maglificio 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. 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 as an activewear designer and manufacturer was applied to his and
Rosita's designs, which contributed significantly to the development of
Italian sportswear as a challenge to the
American industry. In 1965, Anna Piaggi covered
Missoni in an article for Arianna, a magazine published by Mondadori. 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. This helped bring Missoni to the attention of the wider world,
as did a joint collection with Emmanuelle
Khanh in 1965. 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. Although the
see-through look was presented by Yves Saint Laurent the following
year, the Missonis were not invited back to Florence. 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. The
Missonis went on to feature in many leading fashion Wear Daily, Vogue, Marie and were championed by influential editors such as Diana
Vreeland and Piaggi.In 1970, Missoni opened their first
in-store boutique at Bloomingdale's in
New York, and their first directly-owned boutique in Milan in 1976. ttavio was
the colourist and pattern designer whose watercolour basis of Missoni textiles, whilst his wife developed the cuts and shapes of
their garments. 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. 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" In azaar and Queen selected
male and female ensembles by Missoni as the Dress of the
Year for the Fashion Museum, Bath. 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. 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. 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. In 1991 an exhibition in Yūrakuchō,
Tokyo, was held of Ottavio's tapestries, the first time they had been displayed
in Japan.