Emilio Pucci

Italian aristocrat, Marchese and pioneer of Italian designer clothes who started his own fashion house in 1950 and became a top couturier. He and his eponymous company are synonymous with geometric prints in a kaleidoscope of colours.

Marchese Emilio Pucci di Barsento was born into a noble Florentine family. He received a social science degree in Oregon where he perfected his American English, one of five languages. He studied in Italy for the diplomatic corps in Milan, but World War II interrupted. He joined the Italian air force, becoming the pilot of a torpedo bomber and was decorated for bravery.

After Italy joined the Allies against Nazi Germany in 1943, Pucci rescued Edda Ciano, the daughter of Benito Mussolini, from her German guards. He smuggled her and her children into Switzerland along with some compromising diaries of her husband, Galeazzo, a former Fascist foreign minister who was anti-Mussolini and was later executed by the Nazi-Fascist government. When he returned from Switzerland, he was arrested and tortured for information about the diaries by the Gestapo, but refused to talk. With Pucci's help, the diaries were published in the United States in 1945, embarrassing Axis powers. Pucci went on to serve in the Italian Parliament and as a councillor in Florence, and Italians referred to him as "il marchese divino" or the divine marquis.

His interest in design was born one morning in 1947, when he encountered an Englishwoman on the slopes of the Alps and decided that while she was beautiful, her clothes were not. Legend now says that there was a lot more (or less) than clothes between Pucci and the Englishwoman, but he kept her name a secret.

Pucci staged an impromptu fashion show which caught the eye of a Harper's Bazaar photographer. He went on to dominate the fashion world from the 1950s to the 1970s with, among other things, his "palazzo pajamas" created in swirling palettes of blues, greens and other hues inspired by Capri.