Emilio Pucci Profiles
The life behind the kaleidoscope prints — Florence, the Pucci Palace, and 1914.
Emilio Pucci, Marquis of Barsento, was a Florentine Italian fashion designer and politician. He and his eponymous company are synonymous with geometric prints in a kaleidoscope of colors. This profiles page tells his story as the record gives it: the noble Florentine birth of 1914, the Pucci Palace that was his home and workplace, and a second career in politics beside the fashion house. Of all the pages in this series, this is the one the others depend on.
Emilio Pucci was born in 1914 of one of Florence's oldest noble families, and would live and work in the Pucci Palace in Florence for much of his life. The biography searches in the references gather the wider career coverage; the house's official website is also linked there.
Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.
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Florence and the Pucci Palace
Few designers are as completely identified with one city as Pucci is with Florence. Born there into one of its oldest noble families, he lived and worked in the Pucci Palace for much of his life, and the house that carries his name grew from that base into an international signature — the printed jersey dress, carried around the world as the uniform of a new kind of resort elegance.
The signature itself is the point of the whole record filed in this series: geometric prints in a kaleidoscope of colors, engineered into fluid garments that packed flat, weighed almost nothing and arrived unwrinkled — glamour designed, deliberately, to be practical, comfortable and in the right weight and color.
Designer and Politician
Pucci's public life had a second strand unusual among fashion designers: politics. The Marquis of Barsento was a politician as well as a designer, and the two careers ran in parallel from the same Florentine base — the palace that housed the fashion house also anchored a life in Italian public affairs.
Read with the collections page, the profile completes its arc: a Florentine nobleman who turned his family's palace into the headquarters of a house recognized everywhere by a single printed pattern. The runway, fall and spring pages file the clothes; this page keeps the man — marquis, designer, politician — in order.
Common Questions
Who was Emilio Pucci?
Emilio Pucci, Marquis of Barsento, was a Florentine Italian fashion designer and politician. He and his eponymous company are synonymous with geometric prints in a kaleidoscope of colors.
Where was Emilio Pucci born?
He was born in 1914 into one of Florence's oldest noble families, and would live and work in the Pucci Palace in Florence for much of his life.
What is the Pucci signature?
Geometric prints in a kaleidoscope of colors — vivid patterned jersey dresses and resort pieces, the signature the collections, fall, spring and runway pages in this series file season by season.