Missoni became a label in 1953 when Angela’s mother Rosita was barely 21. The daughter of a well-established weaver, she had just married the handsome Ottavio Missoni, who had run for Italy in the 1948 Olympics, despite having just spent four years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Egypt. He was interested in applying the weaving process to sportswear, so together the young couple began to design, incorporating the colors they both loved into the recipe. The rest, as they say, is history, and since 1997 the business has been officially in Angela’s hands. "I was a little worried that we were going to have a Prince Charles effect," she smiles, "because my parents are still so active. I thought that perhaps they would not be ready to give up until my children were ready to take over."
It is not only for her three children that Angela has stayed in Sumirago, a small and very green village in the foothills of the Alps near the town of Varese, an area famous for its weaving dynasties. She is surrounded by rolling hills and lakes and the homes of other members of the Missoni clan (Rosita Missoni had 13 cousins). Although to the outsider’s eye it may seem surprising that Angela – exuberant, international and sociable – lives in the country, a good hour’s drive from the nearest club, she is invested with family values, and the Missonis all work together in the family factory five minutes’ drive up the road: "Sometimes I feel that that’s my real home." Angela often sees her parents and two brothers for lunch and at weekends, despite the fact that they already spend all their working days together. They are so clannish that for years Missoni’s advertising was a photograph of the family – numbering up to 20 of them. Angela was much moved when she discovered old photographs showing one of her mother’s cousins playing in the grounds of what is now her house. It is attached to the apartment where she lived as a girl, and her father owns the land – originally bought because of the fine trees. Family, for the Missonis, is everything.
Angela moved into the late 19th-century villa when her third child was born. It had been rather unsuccessfully renovated in the 1960s, and she decided to re-work the spaces completely, adding a floor, repairing a roof and puncturing the façade with much-needed windows. She built a veranda to bring some of the voluptuous greenery inside and painted the whole place in dove gray, which acts as a neutral foil to her eclectic collection of objects.
"At 20 you don’t listen to architects. Sometimes I rather wish I had, because now I have this huge house and only five rooms." Angela stands in her kitchen, the only room that looks rationally designed. "I love food and I love to cook, so the kitchen was important and I was terrified of getting it wrong. We all camped in the attic and cooked on a gas ring for two years!" The attic, a loft-like room of 16,000 square feet, with fantastic views over the Monte Rosa, was conceived as Angela’s "grown-up world: my bedroom, bathroom and my own sitting room. I was influenced by the idea of one large space, with no doors." The only dividers are Japanese-style screens that glide across studded with a rich patchwork of family snapshots. The children’s rooms are on the floor below and the dining room is by the stairs going down to the ground floor. That room is dominated by a very "New York" Dan Friedman screen, while the lounge boasts a large painting by Chilean artist Eduardo Guelfenbein. His vibrant colorful brushstrokes are the artistic reflection not only of the Missoni rainbow palette but also of Angela’s interior, depending as that does for its effect on sudden flashes of color: a Memphis table here, a giant wooden palm tree from Bali there, a collection of 1950s glass baubles. Angela Missoni’s home has no proper structuring of space, but it has vitality and movement. It feels spontaneous much as the clothes she designs. "I wanted to create a house that was in the country without being a country house. I wanted something modern, something new. I don’t have any proper furniture, just chairs and sofas from flea markets. For me the biggest link between my fashion designing and the interior is that the moment I began to design seriously, I stopped taking care of the house. Nowadays I just have weekend blitzes!
"The other link is that the house is full of Missoni clothes. Although I don’t design at home, I do wear the result! Seriously, I suppose the house has the same intuitive and spontaneous qualities that I draw upon for my mad patterns and crazy colorways." An outsider can spot the link immediately: Angela’s house has been funky for years, and now she has begun to apply that approach to the company.
The house is ideally situated only an hour away from Florence and Siena, and even closer to the Mediterranean resorts of Viareggio (famously chic in the 1950s with the Vespa boys and girls) and Forte dei Marmi. The latter has more up-to-date big-name boutiques than the average city in Britain or the United States: Only in Italy would you find such an obviously fashion-conscious populace indulging in the evening passeggiata. Smith, however, is safely hidden away on a plateau between two hills, in the mountains behind Pietrasanta, the town of historic marble quarries, where sculptors from Michelangelo to Botero have lived. Swimming in the calm, calm sea off those well-ordered Italian sands, with their gaily-painted lounge chairs and striped umbrellas, you can see Smith’s hills, rising up majestically behind the beach. His neighbors are a different type of Italian, people of the country: farmers and wine growers, and even a boscaiolo – a forest warden who tends the thickly-wooded hills.
Far from Forte dei Marmi’s cosmopolitan atmosphere, Smith lives a very "country" existence. "We live well away from everybody, and are extremely antisocial," admits Smith, "but that is why we bought such an isolated house. All our neighbors are locals: We didn’t buy a house in Tuscany to spend all our time with the expats." Smith bought the house in the mid-1980s with his painter girlfriend Pauline Denyer-Smith, an ex-Slade student. They had just sold a house in England and, over a dinner in Paris, they impulsively decided to re-invest the money in property straight away, rather than frittering it on furniture or paintings. They had some close friends who suggested Tuscany, and though they hardly knew the area, they caught a plane to Pisa and started looking. They visited ruin after ruin and finally settled on the most derelict, a farmhouse that had not been lived in for more than 20 years. Although the area is clearly Mediterranean, there is a greenness about it that is reminiscent of the lushness of certain areas of the English shires – pre-Industrial Revolution, and with double the sunshine.
"We loved the fact that it was not a villa but a farmhouse, and that we would be surrounded only by Italians who had lived there all their lives. The peace and the privacy are what attracted us the most. That and the thousands of trees." In line with their search for authenticity, the couple spent two years quietly restoring their find with the help and advice of the local geometra. They flew out from England to supervise the work, staying at the Principessa Hotel in Lucca and combing the countryside to source old tiles and replacement beams, so that the house could be restored with only period materials. The whole process took longer than had originally been expected, so there was time to scour the local antique shops and markets for simple, rural furnishings – with rich results. They also shopped for furniture in London and at their favorite Paul Bert flea market in Paris.
Architecturally, their main concern was to open up the house to the light, "so that the terrace could become the main living room, and we could bring the outside in." They pierced the façade with three large arches and built a terrace which, complete with a marble-topped table, is their favorite corner. "We spend most of the time outside as we are mainly here during the summer. Surrounded by the countryside, the people and the fantastic food, every moment is enjoyable." The couple did all the decorating themselves: "As the farmhouse was derelict when we chanced upon it, we wanted to recreate the feel of when it was first built. There were still traces of the original colors on the walls, so we had them re-mixed in a very transparent water-based paint, which doesn’t penetrate the wall evenly, and gives a very interesting effect, which we like to think is probably quite close to the original." From tiny fragments of paint and plaster, they managed to establish that some of the rooms had been bi-colored, the two tones separated by a thin, rusty red line. Now they have a green and pale blue bedroom, a blue dining room, and a yellow and green entrance hall, as well as a traditional ochre façade.
This interest in color is reflected in Smith’s fashion work: When he first burst on to the scene, his brightly-colored men’s fashions represented a revolution for the then dull palette of men’s clothes. "The house reflects the clothes I design in the importance of color and simplicity. Being a designer has made me more conscious of the visual aspects of the interior: such things as proportion."
Early on during the building Smith made the decision not to use the house as an escape for the weekends but instead only to spend long periods there at a time – a month or more. "It always takes me about a week to calm down and relax anyway. That’s when I begin to enjoy it; I do a lot of mountain biking in the hills. I like the idea of living here and not just passing through: when you stay for a month you really begin to feel as if you belong."
Vogue has singled out Mizrahi as one of fashion’s new Establishment, laying bets that he will be a household name by the end of the decade. In America he is already just that – in the better dressed households at any rate – due to the brilliant 1995 documentary film Unzipped, which starred Mizrahi and his world. Unzipped scooped up film awards, but, unexpectedly, it also generated huge affection for the eccentric prodigy. It had a phenomenal effect on his popularity, probably because Mizrahi came across as a thoroughly good guy – extravagant, perhaps, but in full possession of a sharp sense of humor too.
In real life, Mizrahi speaks in capital letters, and has quirky grammar, thick with adjectives, which reflects an infectious enthusiasm for everything he does. It is this deep-seated sense of fun that lies behind the brilliant colors (inspired, he admits, by candy wrappers) and mad prints of his signature collections.
One is reminded of the 1950s "fashion-goes-to-Hollywood" musical comedy Funny Face, and the editors’ war cry: "Banish the black... think pink." If there is ever to be a remake, Mizrahi would be spot-on in the barmy Kay Thompson role – a good-time, pseudo-Diana Vreeland. He would no doubt qualify, having studied acting and music at the High School of Performing Arts. He combined his coursework with evening classes in fashion at the equally renowned Parson’s School of Design. After his graduation as an actor in 1979, he enrolled at Parson’s full time. Mizrahi had known even when he was 12 that he wanted to be a designer, ever since watching a 1960s television remake about the thwarted love affair of a fashion designer. High heels, taffeta, lengths of silk: He was smitten... while his Yeshiva teachers could not understand why the odd little boy insisted on making dresses for Barbie.
The essential thing to grasp about Mizrahi is his deep-seated admiration for all the great glamour moments. He seems to have the entire catalogue at his fingertips, like the curator of the MGM film library, and he positively melts at the idea of Audrey Hepburn’s graphic minimalism or Rita Hayworth’s satin-clad Gilda. His mother, who got her Norell dresses and the like at Loehman’s and who has a great original sense of style, is part of all that. "She dared to wear my father’s pyjamas to the beach before anyone had thought of it...a connoisseur." Both Mizrahi and his mother understandably shed tears when they discovered – after he had moved in – that Norell had previously lived in Isaac’s new apartment building. Strangely, the decorative scheme that Mizrahi and his architect Ross Anderson had outlined drew heavily on Norell – bleached wood and natural leather. With such serendipitous beginnings, the tiny Greenwich Village apartment still charms him: "It was my life’s dream to live in the Village. All my needs are satisfied by this apartment. It is the perfect size... I’m too busy really for a grand place." Nevertheless, Mizrahi often entertains friends: "I prefer intimate groups, and considering the size of the apartment, it’s a good thing."
Although Anderson had also collaborated on Mizrahi’s atelier, the apartment was slower to mature, even though all they really did was tidy up the interior. "I wanted something soothing. Cozy. Easy. My life is complicated and I need respite from it. I did not want anything that required too much maintenance. The re-definition of luxury is consistent with what I did in the atelier: the mix of raw and refined elements and textures. It was not until I got my piano, which is the central element in my apartment, that I could decorate. I knew it would dominate and I knew it was senseless to proceed with anything else in the room. I lived like a monk until it came. I practically even waited to unpack – considering the piano took two-and-a-half years to find, that was very slow progress. A German Steinway of circa 1936, it is my most-prized possession: pristine ivories, perfect tone, heavenly action."
Once the piano was installed, Mizrahi set about seeking out furniture for his decorative theme: "Fred Astaire meets 2001 – A Space Odyssey." Looking at the apartment’s clean lines and classic design pieces, Astaire seems to have come out tops. "Everything I choose is me. I think that because I am a fashion designer I am less fearful about experimenting at home. And, acting as an arbiter of fashion, you have answers for lots of design queries. But knowing how many options there are can confuse the issue. And yet everything I do relates to everything else. I can’t say how specifically: Suffice it to say that the same sensibility reverberates in all that I do – whether it’s a room, or a suit, or a soufflé, or a piano concerto.
"Days are rarely typical in my life. The only constant is what I eat for breakfast. When I work at home I shuffle between the drawing table and the piano. Something about practicing the piano while I’m designing clothes works for me. I like to do many things at once. My favorite thing is to be in the bath, with the bedroom door open so that I can see the television (or its mirror image). I also spend a lot of time in bed, which is where I have the most fun – whether I am alone or accompanied."