Italian designer was known for ‘hot pants’
Regarded as royalty in Milan for half a century
Mariuccia Mandelli, an Italian fashion designer who electrified the runway with short shorts known as “hot pants,” knitwear whimsically emblazoned with animals, and pantsuits for the modern, yet feminine, working woman, died Dec. 6 at her home in Milan. She was 90.
The cause was not immediately available.
Mandelli was regarded as royalty in Milan, the fashion capital of Italy, for more than half a century. A one-time elementary school teacher, she launched Krizia, her fashion label, in the mid-1950s, drawing its name from a Platonic dialogue about female vanity.
A decade later, still relatively unknown, she stunned the insular Italian design world by claiming an important fashion prize for a collection presented at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. The award identified her as both a significant talent and a maverick: Unlike many of her contemporaries, she had eschewed wild colours in favour of black and white.
Blacks, browns and creams — the shades of Italian coffees, the San Francisco Chronicle once observed — remained prominent in her palette for years. Her independent streak, likewise, lasted. Umberto Eco, the Italian author and philosopher, quoted in W Magazine, observed that Mandelli “invents the taste of her own public.”
She designed clothing for children and for men, and the Krizia line included jewelry, fragrances and champagne. But she was best known for womenswear that was seen as contemporary and daring, a reflection of the feminist movement that coincided with her rise in design.
“Women at the time expressed the will to change the system,” she once told Corriere, an Italian daily.
Designers, she said, took their lead. “I tried to liberate women by eliminating what was superfluous, adapting clothing to daily life.”
She used fabrics that were mainstays of men’s clothing, such as pinstripe wools. She favoured pants — whether jodhpurs, stirrups or billowy knickers — over the more traditionally feminine skirt. And she made innovative use of pleats to project both power and style.
But she disdained women’s fashion that copied menswear, including the style of pantsuit that was once promoted for career women.
“We are going toward the year 2000 and women should go ahead, and not backwards, and strike out on their own,” she told The Washington Post in 1984. “To copy mannish clothes is to repeat an error.”
To avoid repeating the error, Mandelli designed a variation on what she considered the stale office uniform for women.
“She makes a pantsuit look soft and gentle by using unconstructed jackets and trousers that fit smoothly across the hips, then widen toward the ankles,” fashion critic Bernadine Morris wrote in the New York Times in 1988.
In other outfits, she employed sheer fabric — or the absence of fabric — to alluring effect. In the early 1970s, Mandelli helped popularize the hot pants that were distinguishable primarily for how little of the leg they covered.
“They used to call me ‘Crazy Krizia’ because I was ready to try anything,” she once told the Toronto Star.
Mariuccia Mandelli was born in Bergamo, Italy, on Jan. 31, 1925.
Mandelli studied in Switzerland and worked for a time as an elementary teacher before venturing into fashion.
Survivors include her husband and business partner, Aldo Pinto.