Missoni

In 1953, Ottavio and Rosita Missoni settled in Gallarate and set up a small knitwear workshop in the basement of their home. Their shared business grew from that workshop, continuing the knitwear work Ottavio had begun in Trieste. The Missoni house was founded in 1953.^[1,2,3]

In 1958, Ottavio and Rosita presented the Milano-Simpathy collection at La Rinascente in Milan. A brightly striped shirt dress appeared in the department store’s Piazza del Duomo windows; the Missoni label had only recently begun to be sewn inside the garments. It was an early public appearance for the name the house still carries.^[1]

The MA*GA traces Missoni’s experiments with printed designs to the early 1960s, alongside its striped and zigzag knitwear. For multicolour screen printing, a design is separated into colour areas and reproduced through corresponding screens; changing the colour assigned to each screen can create new palettes from the same drawing. The process made colour variation part of the textile design itself.^[4]