The Italians know what they’re doing when it comes to creating la bella figura. Italian fashion – indeed the whole Italian package – has permeated our lives. It’s enough for something to read “Made in Italy” and we’re attracted, possibly also seduced. And if we’re talking about fashion, we have to talk about Milan.
Italian fashion, at least on an international scale, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Florence was home to the fashion shows right through the 1950s and 1960s, after the first Italian High Fashion Show that had taken place in 1951; yet at the end of the 1960s things started to change. In 1967 Missoni created a stir when Rita Missoni didn’t like the underwear the models were wearing at the show at Palazzo Pitti and asked them to remove it, the effect being far sexier than planned.
Missoni didn’t receive an invite to Palazzo Pitti the following year, and so they held their own fashion show in Milan at the Solari swimming pool. Others followed suit in what signalled a shift from Florence to Milan.