Emanuel Ungaro, adventurous fashion designer, is dead at 86

Emanuel Ungaro, whose merging of attention-getting colors and patterns with sleek lines made him one of the most talkedabout fashion designers in Paris beginning in the 1960s and served as the foundation for the fashion house that still bears his name, died Saturday in Paris. He was 86.

The Emanuel Ungaro fashion house, which Ungaro sold in 2005, announced his death on its Facebook page. No cause was given.

Ungaro, who came from a family of tailors, established his fashion house in 1965 after working under designer Cristobal Balenciaga.

Celebrity journalist James Brady wrote in a

“Brady’s Bits” column in 1987 that Ungaro, whom he had known since the 1960s, financed his first show with a loan that used a girlfriend’s Porsche as collateral. The event, Brady wrote, was held in a small apartment. People sat on the balcony and peered in through windows to see the clothes.

Within a few years, Ungaro’s creations were being worn by A-listers like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and were being seen in films on Catherine Deneuve (in “Le Sauvage,” 1975), Gena Rowlands (“Gloria,” 1980) and other actresses.

His ever-changing signatures over the years included stand-up collars, abundant use of suede, wrap dresses, mixed prints and more. He might pair a paisley blouse with a plaid suit, or prescribe a colorful shawl for a distinctive look, or go all in on polka dots.

“I hate boring clothes,” he told The Washington Post in 1977. “I hate seeing women dressed in a sad way.”

Ungaro explained his approach to design in 1994, when he opened a boutique in New York City.

“If you want to exist in fashion, and in any other manifestation of art, you have to disturb people,” he told The New York Times. “Provocation, in my mouth, means disturbing to the eye. Not disturb just to disturb, but disturb by showing something unexpected.”

Emanuel Ungaro was born Feb. 13, 1933, in Aixen-Provence, in the south of France. His father, Cosimo, was a tailor who had fled fascist Italy.

“My father is like a god to me,” Ungaro told The

Boston Globe in 1965. “He taught me to respect line and quality, and to take pains with every stitch.”

After working for three years in his father’s tailoring business, determined to make a career in fashion but needing a bigger stage on which to do it, he left his hometown for Paris when he was 21.

“I arrived in Paris with two pairs of pants, three shirts and not one cent in my pocket,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1992.

He spent two years as a stylist for Maison Camps tailors, then in 1958 took a job with Balenciaga’s fashion house. He spent six years there, absorbing Balenciaga’s ideas on line and color and how to drape the body.

In 1965 he established his own company.