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for auction a RARE "Missoni Fashions" Ottavio Missoni Hand Signed 10X8 Color Photo Todd Mueller COA. 

ES-2074

Ottavio

"Tai" Missoni (11

February 1921 – 9 May 2013) was the founder of the Italian fashion label Missoni and an

Olympic hurdler who

competed 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 educated

in Zadar, Trieste,

and Milan.

After the war, Ottavio and his team-mate Giorgio

Oberweger launched an activewear business in Trieste making

wool tracksuits,

which 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 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. 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. Ottavio's

experience 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 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.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 paintings and gouaches formed

the 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 1974, Jennifer

Hocking of Harper's 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.