Emilio Pucci; Designer’s Clothes Graced Closets of Rich

ROME —  On a bright morning in 1947, two things struck Emilio Pucci about the Englishwoman he met skiing the slopes of the Alps: She was beautiful. She wore ugly clothes.

That day changed his life. And the history of fashion.

A chapter in that history has now come to an end. Pucci, a pioneer of Italian designer clothes, a magician with brightly patterned silk that found niches in wardrobes around the world, is dead at 78.

His family, which includes his daughter, Laudomia, herself a well-known designer, said he fell ill Sunday morning at his home in Florence. He was rushed from the family’s Palazzo Pucci on Via dei Pucci to a private clinic, where he died about an hour later of what officials described as a heart attack.

The self-taught Pucci left an indelible, colorful stamp on fashion from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period when Italian design moved from postwar parsimony to the era of flower power.

He designed clothes for the rich and the famous. At her request, Marilyn Monroe was buried in a Pucci. And Pucci designed for the not-so-rich, transforming bright Italian silks into everyday chic. For one American airline, Pucci designed not only the hostesses’ uniforms, but also the exterior color schemes of the planes.

Americans in particular loved Pucci’s “palazzo pajamas,” created in swirling palettes of blues, greens and other Mediterranean hues inspired by his visits to the isle of Capri. His shirts, belts, scarves and shoes became standbys for fashion plates as diverse as Jacqueline Kennedy and Grace Kelly. Pucci’s fashion house, now directed by his children, remains a Florentine pillar of design.

Mary Rourke, The Times’ fashion editor, called Pucci “the Prince of Prints.”

“Those tiny, intricate, pastel color designs he developed in the 1950s became the fabric equivalent of the man himself. Bright, busy, even slightly madcap, those prints captured the hallucinogenic spirit of the psychedelic ‘60s, when Pucci prints swept the fashion world like the euphoric energy waves of a love-in. Their clear, cosmetic colors--turquoise, fuchsia, violet and green--were intended as joyous, he once said. And his imitators were legion.

“The supple, lightweight silk jersey fabric he used for his collections was as much a signature of his work as were the prints themselves. Sleek, modern shift dresses, tunics and narrow-leg pants were status symbols seen at every jet-set watering hole from Capri to Monte Carlo.

“But to Pucci they were simply the ultimate in modernity. ‘I have dresses that weigh under three ounces,’ he boasted not long ago. ‘You take the dress, put it in your pocket, come out of the office, go to the bathroom, wash, make up and put it on. You’re ready for dinner.’ ”

Marchese Emilio Pucci di Barsento was born in Naples of a noble Florentine family whose members still live in the 1,000-year-old palazzo whose brass doorknobs were often polished by Pucci himself, well into his 70s.

A man of elegant bearing, a cosmopolitan polyglot--he spoke five languages, Pucci was an aristocrat to his bones. He delighted in noting that in one painting of a Renaissance banquet of the Medicis, the only guest shown eating with what resembled a fork was a Pucci; everyone else ate with his hands.

Pucci perfected his American English while winning a social sciences degree at Reed College in Oregon, but in later years spoke with the silver tongue of an English aristocrat. In Italy, his studies in Milan for the diplomatic corps were short-circuited by World War II.

He joined the Italian air force, became the pilot of a torpedo bomber and was decorated for bravery. But the war story for which he is best remembered was earthbound.

After Italy abandoned the Axis and joined the Allies against Nazi Germany in 1943, Pucci rescued Edda Ciano, the daughter of Benito Mussolini, from her German guards.

He smuggled Ciano and her children into Switzerland along with the compromising diaries of her husband, Galeazzo, a former Fascist foreign minister who voted to overthrow Mussolini and was later executed by the Nazi-Fascist government that succeeded him.

After Pucci returned from Switzerland, he was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured for information about the diaries. He refused to talk. With Pucci’s help, the diaries were published in the United States in 1945, to the embarrassment of Mussolini and ally Adolf Hitler.

The elegant man whom Italians liked to call il marchese divino-- the divine marquis--for his genius with color and design would later serve in the Italian Parliament and as a councilman in his beloved Florence.

But it was that day in the Alps that Pucci always cited as the turning point, the day he looked at a woman and realized with a start that he could make her appear more beautiful.

Thus was a designer born. Almost as a joke, Pucci staged an impromptu fashion show to display his creations. They happened to catch the eye of Harper’s Bazaar photographer Toni Frissel. The rest is history.

As the story goes, there was a lot more than clothes between Pucci and his beautiful English inspiration. But he was a gentleman, and although he loved to retell the story, Pucci never told her name.