Emilio Pucci

Fashion Design   Apparel Definition

From the Olympic Ski Team to a Harper's Bazaar Photograph

Emilio Pucci was born in Naples on November 20, 1914, the son of an Italian noble, and studied in both Italy and the USA, eventually gaining a doctorate in political science in 1941. His route into fashion ran through sport. He was a member of the Italian Olympic ski team of 1934, won a skiing scholarship to Reed College in Oregon in 1935, and first ventured into clothing design at Reed by creating the ski team's uniforms. The decisive moment came by accident of publicity: in 1947 he was photographed by Toni Frissel, a photographer working for Harper's Bazaar, wearing skiwear Pucci had designed himself. On learning this, Frissel's editor asked him to design skiwear for a story on European Winter Fashion, which ran in the winter 1948 issue of the Bazaar. The exposure encouraged him to create and sell clothes for women, and in 1950 he opened a couture house on the Isle of Capri. Skiwear is a revealing starting point for a designer: it is clothing judged by movement, weather and visibility on a slope, so colour and pattern are functional before they are decorative.

Bright Colours, Bold Patterns and Capri Pants

Pucci became well known for his signature use of bright colours and bold patterns, which often clashed. That willingness to let colours clash is what makes the work recognisable: a printed Pucci fabric can be identified across a room, which turns every dress into a sign of its maker without a logo. His popular early creations were a line of wrinkle-free printed silk dresses and the still popular Capri pants. Wrinkle-free is a practical promise aimed at women travelling to and from a resort island such as Capri, where the couture house stood; a silk dress that arrives wearable answers the conditions of the holiday wardrobe directly. Capri pants took their identity from the same place, a shortened trouser suited to the island setting that outlasted its origin and remained popular long after. Together the dresses and the pants show the two sides of the house: printed silk at its most vivid, and a simple garment shape that entered general dress.

Parliament, Airline Uniforms and the Revived Brand

Pucci's life was not confined to fashion. He was a respected and well-known fascist, having written often in support of the subject, and in 1965 he was elected to the Italian parliament. While a member of parliament he was hired by the New York advertising agency Jack Tinker and Associates to redesign the hostess wardrobes for Braniff International Airways, and between 1965 and 1977 he designed seven complete outfits for Braniff hostesses, pilots and ground crew, incorporating Alexander Girard's BI logo into some of his prints. Designing seven successive outfits over twelve years for cabin crew, pilots and ground staff is uniform design at full scale: the same identity had to work across very different jobs while staying unmistakably one airline. After Pucci's death in 1992 his daughter Laudomia Pucci continued to design under the Pucci name. The brand was revived by the French firm Louis Vuitton-Moet-Hennessy Group, which acquired the rights in 2000; designers who have worked under the Pucci brand include Julio Espada and Christian LaCroix, and Laudomia Pucci continues to serve as Image Director.