Margherita Missoni

[gossiping]

style.com

 

[Boots & Perfume]

That dress is a bit plain and old for her, but she still looks as lovely as always.

 

[Melly5525]

Its a nice change but im not that crazy about the Valentino dress but she looks just stunning in that last pic, love the Missoni gown at the Archives party, classic Missoni but the hair looks to stiff in that updo.

 

[MiuMiuLove]

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my own vogue scan

 

[jetmeiko]

The article is so cute, thanks for posting! I really like the bags, too.

 

[gossiping]

The current Missoni advertising campaign tells you everything you need to know about this Italian family's approach to fashion.

It features the entire Missoni clan at home in Sumirago, near Milan, during a typical family get-together. But rather than a glossy campaign for one of Italy's most beloved fashion labels, it looks more like a small child has run riot with a disposable camera.


There are wonky close-ups, people with their eyes closed, heads out of shot,someone dozing on a sofa, even a fish lying next to a dish-cloth… Where are the semi-naked models, greased and glistening? Where is the air of carefully styled, Photoshopped perfection?
In fact, the campaign, by the photographer Juergen Teller, is clever and refreshing, because this is the Missoni family as they really are. The house with its colourful rugs, walls covered in paintings and photographs, the big smiles, the silly faces, the hugs between family members, are not just for the camera.
The most valuable marketing tool the Missonis have is their personality, and this is evident the minute you meet Margherita, the eldest grandchild of the family.

Margherita Maccapani Missoni is the latest family member to join the company as a designer. She is tall, exceptionally pretty, with thick mahogany-coloured hair and dark brown eyes. Her voice is gravelly and low and, like many things about her, suggests someone more mature than 27.
She is slim, but not 'fashion thin', and is free of make-up. Her luxe-hippy style means she regularly appears on best-dressed lists, and today she looks effortlessly cool in a white vest, black cotton trousers and a bronze Missoni cardigan.
While her mother, Angela, is the creative director and in charge of the main collections, and her grandmother, at 80, still runs the home collection and the Missoni hotels, Margherita is quickly making her name as the company's talented accessories designer.
After designing the sunglasses for this year's spring/summer collection, she has worked on all the accessories for the autumn/winter collection, including a new range of bags, which are already a hit with the fashion press and in boutiques such as Colette, in Paris.
'I always felt it was a shame that we didn't develop the accessories,' she says, taking a sip from her glass of white wine, 'considering that for most fashion brands it is the biggest side of their business.' The accessories range was an obvious place for her to start, she says. 'I also thought, since it wasn't the main collection, if I f– up it's not going to be disastrous.'
Missoni was founded in 1953 by Margherita's grandparents Rosita and Ottavio, who met in London during the 1948 Olympic Games, where Ottavio was an athlete on the Italian national team.
After they married Rosita and Ottavio set up a small workshop in the basement of their house. Anna Piaggi, the creative consultant of Italian Vogue, was one of the first to champion their new take on knitwear, the weaving techniques and clever blending of colours.
But it was in 1969 when they met the formidable Diana Vreeland, at the time the editor of American Vogue, that their fortune changed. On seeing the beautiful dresses and knitwear, she said, 'Look! Who said that only colours exist? There are also tones.'
In 1998 Rosita's daughter Angela took over as creative director and since then the brand has become a global success. Somehow this hasn't meant losing its identity as a small artisan-led business – the Missoni clothes are still made in the factory in Sumirago, a few hundred metres from the family home.
It is her family, Margherita says, who have managed to keep her so grounded, and from whom her sense of style has evolved. 'Fashion is a real passion in my family,' she says. 'I never even realised it was something glamorous until much later. For me it was my family's job.'
She is remarkably level-headed and says she finds the preoccupation with must-have 'it' items boring, preferring to wear clothes that are not easily identifiable.
She has a warmth and enthusiasm that beams out of her and throughout the interview seems to teeter on the edge of raucous laughter – a whole-hearted belly laugh – or tears, particularly when talking about her close-knit family.
Margherita, her younger brother, Francesco, and sister, Teresa, grew up within a stone's throw of their cousins and grandparents.
'I grew up in the countryside with the factory here, my house 200 metres away, my grandma's house 50 metres away, in a kind of old-style Italian society where everyone works for the family business, everyone lives nearby and the people you spend your time with are your family.'
It was a combination, she says, of a traditional upbringing, complemented by a more bohemian approach to life. It was, she admits, something of a 'hippy commune', with friends and associates coming and going – such as the man who came to make mosaics for her mother and ended up living in the garden in a small house with his two boyfriends.
This unconventionality benefited her after her parents divorced when she was seven. She is still close to her father, Marco Maccapani (whose name she uses as well as her mother's), a film and events producer.
Margherita has said before how much she admires her mother for never criticising her father to her children, and for years the whole family, including her father, would holiday together in Sardinia.
With her mother working for the label, Margherita says she spent her childhood playing in the factory after school. 'My games were taking Polaroids, playing with fabric, being models, getting dressed up, because that was the only thing that was there.'
She remembers insisting on wearing a Vivienne Westwood crown to nursery when she was five (Westwood worked for Missoni), but for a long time was oblivious to the kind of power fashion could have.
'I was 12 when I started really wanting stuff from other brands,' she says giggling. 'It was the first year of Tom Ford at Gucci and there were those velvet suits in red or blue.
'My mum got me a coat from the winter collection on sale, but she made me change all the buttons because they had the double G logo. Not because it was Gucci and not Missoni, but because she thought it was not right for a 12-year-old girl going to school in a Gucci coat. She knew she had created a little monster by then. I mean, she brought me to my first show when I was two weeks old!'
As idyllic as her childhood sounds, Margherita says that as she got older she began to find the constant presence of the family business in her life stifling.
'It's really hard to know how to identify yourself as a person when you come from that environment, because you exist as part of a group. You don't know where you end and the others begin. I guess that's why, when I look back, I felt like going away, far, to a city.'
She started a degree in philosophy at the University of Milan, but moved to Barcelona, then went to live in New York.
'Since I was a child everyone would ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up. Was I going to be a designer? It's as if there was a path drawn for me and I could see, from where I was standing, exactly where it ended.'
She studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute and told her family this was what she wanted do as a career. She continued in her role as the unofficial brand ambassador for Missoni, doing photo-shoots and interviews when required, but with acting, she says, she felt she was doing something that she had chosen to do, rather than something that had been chosen for her.
Eventually, though, the allure of New York wore off and it was time to consider going back home. 'You realise you can go on endlessly. You can meet endless people, go to endless dinners, endless parties. I love acting and it's still something that maybe I'll go back to, but I think it was more a rejection of fashion than a proper love for New York or acting.'
Admitting to her family that she was going to give up acting and join their company after all was something she found hard. While she knew they would be pleased, she says she is a proud person and that the decision was not straightforward.
'For me, it was admitting I'm coming home. It was like saying to my mother, "I'll be back in your life." I was the only one who had left like that, and as I'm also the first grandchild I have a relationship with my grandparents that none of my siblings or cousins has. So for me it was intense. Giving up fashion for ever would have also meant cutting off my family. So going back meant a lot of different things.'
Eventually, after trying repeatedly and each time losing her nerve, she told her mother she wanted to come back and 'cried desperately' while she did it. Her mother didn't seem surprised and simply said, 'Are you free tomorrow at 12 o'clock? We have an appointment.'
Her mother immediately gave her 'incredible freedom and responsibility', but, like most mothers and daughters, their relationship is not without some tension.
Margherita describes one business meeting in which her mother, annoyed at being interrupted by her daughter, clapped her hand hard over Margherita's mouth and made her cry.
And while Angela obviously values her daughter's energy and sense of humour, she doesn't always feel it's well placed. 'For me it's really fun. And that's something I've brought into the atelier – fun. Although my mum says, "You just come here and laugh."
I'll turn up at the factory and shout, "Look at this dress that I found!" and all the girls will run over, saying, "Wow, try it on!" while my mum is screaming, "We still have 50 jackets to finish!" But she looks after every aspect of the company, so she has other stresses.'
The relationship clearly works well, though, and Margherita says her mother still sees her as 'an appendage of herself, as if I'm her third eye. She trusts me.'
The person who is arguably happiest at Margherita's return, however, is her grandmother Rosita. 'My grandma sees a lot of herself in me and I think it would have hurt her quite a bit if I didn't go back to the company.'
Does she think she'll have a different vision to that of her grandma and mother if she does eventually take over as creative director?
'I grew up in the same place as my mother, seeing the same trees my mother saw when she was at work, the flowers I picked were the flowers that my grandma planted. We have different styles, I wouldn't make the same clothes that my mum made, or my grandma, but we have the same taste. So I'm confident in saying that I will be good for them, but I could probably be really s– for someone else!'
She has bought a flat in Milan, 20 minutes away, and is looking forward to moving in. First, though, she must finish clearing out her old childhood room as her mother is moving after 30 years in the same house. Where to? 'Two hundred metres the other way!' she shouts, then falls about laughing.

telegraph.co.uk

 

[MiuMiuLove]

^ That was a great article. Thanks for posting!

 

[marjanthelion]

missoni by kenneth anger video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxrX2fa1IM0

john coulthart

 

[stl]

Such a nice article! Thank you.

 

[gossiping]

she looks amazin in the campaign i forgot to post it here!

 

[MiuMiuLove]

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purple diary

 

[Boots & Perfume]

^ MiuMiuLove I think you put that second picture in the wrong thread

 

[MiuMiuLove]

^Really? It's margherita on my screen...is it someone else when you look at it?

 

[Boots & Perfume]

Ooh how strange - now it is Margherita but before it was a completely different girl (I don't know her name). Never mind then! :winkiss"

 

[gius]

I didn't notice this thread before.. The clothes look so well on her, I guess as expected since she designed them herself XD. She's really made knits something new

El Pais Semanal Magazine
http://img51.imageshack.us/i/epsmargherita.jpg/
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http://img42.imageshack.us/i/epsmargherita3.jpg/
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newwebstar.com

Could someone tell me what this article's about? It's in Spanish I think

 

[gossiping]

i saw her jewellery for the fall collection in the store yesterday. very pretty!

 

[JunyaSchick]

I didn't notice this thread before.. The clothes look so well on her, I guess as expected since she designed them herself XD. She's really made knits something new

Could someone tell me what this article's about? It's in Spanish I think

The article doesn't offer real new information.

It talks about her repercussion as the image of Missoni, her assistance to parties and her collaboration in designing Missoni bags and sunnies. It also compares Missoni with other fashion houses that don't have a family background, that are just focused on a big vissionaire such as Valentino or Ungaro.
Then she answer to a few questions, but nothing interesting.

 

[lifeistiffanyblu]

she looks soo beautiful in those two photos!

 

[gossiping]

i read this article today on fashionologie and angela said that maybe margherita will be the designer in 2 years! that would be pretty cool.

 

[isa.b.elle.]

i would be really curious to see Margherita's design..such a nice girl