When Emilio Pucci took his wife, the young Marchesa Cristina Pucci di Barsento—20 years old to his 45—on their first trip around the world together in 1960, they were met everywhere with social obligations. Yet from Honolulu to Tokyo, Sydney to Bangkok, and back home to Florence, write Idanna Pucci and Terence Ward in their assiduous biography Emilio Pucci: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon, the 21 day dresses, cocktail frocks, and a long ball gown Cristina brought with her were made of a silk jersey so fine they fit into a single suitcase, along with her husband’s dinner jacket, in a similar fabric also of his invention.
It now seems natural that Audrey Hepburn dropped by his studio in the family palazzo, that Jacqueline Kennedy sailed in his scarves, and that any Palm Beach socialite worth her margarita salt dressed in his vibrant, original colors. In 1971, he designed the official NASA emblem for Apollo 15. Capri was his happy place, for which we can thank the eponymous pants. He clothed the dolce vita.
