If business-savvy collaborations between fashion houses and sportswear giants have made “athleisure” a household term, the newest meeting of minds marks a return to the early beginnings of that phenomenon. Launching today, Adidas has joined forces with Missoni on a line of sportswear that evokes the foundation of the Italian knitwear dynasty.
“Sometimes I go to La Scala with sneakers on. I think that’s fine for my look and my 87-year-old feet,” Rosita Missoni says, over the phone from her home outside of Milan. “Adidas can also go to La Scala. Especially if they’re Missoni for Adidas.” In 1953, the Missoni matriarch co-founded the label with her late husband Ottavio ‘Tai’ Missoni. An Olympic hurdler and 400 metre runner who became the youngest member to make Italy’s national team in 1937, aged 16, he continued to compete for his country at the highest level. His sporting career was put on hold when he was drafted into the Italian Army and sent to fight in North Africa in the Second World War, where he was subsequently held as a PoW for four years (as “a guest of the King of England,” as he famously quipped). But he developed an interest in knitted sportswear after returning to Italy in 1946.
One knitting machine was quickly joined by another, and by the early 1950s Missoni was making uniforms for the Italian track and field, basketball and water polo teams. Three generations on, few would associate the family-run company’s signature knitwear with sports. But the Adidas collaboration is, in fact, as inherent as it gets for Missoni. “We’d use Adidas shoes during the summer,” Rosita recalls. “If we had to buy sportswear it was Adidas. They were the best. As simple as that.” Adidas was founded in 1949, at the same time as Tai Missoni was pushing the boundaries of knitwear for the Italian national teams. The shared history between the brands sets a natural premise for the new women’s and menswear collaboration, which fuses Adidas’s Ultraboost trainer and Boost technology with Missoni’s space-dyeing technique and famous Flame pattern.
Intended as ‘real’ sportswear rather than sporty daywear, every piece in the collection is still easily adaptable. Take the apparel, for instance, where Adidas’s Primeknit technology is employed in a set of performance-focused running garments (T-shirts, £129, shorts, £89, jackets, £279) executed as Missoni knits – they’ll work for the gym as well as the daily grind. It’s an ongoing dress code evolution Rosita Missoni understands. “I think people have to feel free; to get up and wear what they want. I wear knitted running shoes as part of my daywear. They have a young touch and they’re quite comfortable.”
In 1937, aged 16, the track star Ottavio Missoni became the youngest member of Italy’s national team. He continued to compete at the highest level, and was selected for the Italian team for the 1948 Olympics in London.
The daughter of dressmakers, she expanded her husband’s sportswear business into day and eveningwear in the 1950s, shaping Missoni’s inimitable sense of colour and geometry into one of fashion’s hottest knitted commodities. “The first thing Tai wanted to do was a knitted wool uniform for the Italian track and field team. The top was in a thick rib and the trousers were in a flat double-knit,” Rosita recalls. “This was the beginning of knitwear for Tai.”
Rosita and Tai Missoni, photographed in 1984.
Giuseppe Pino
By the 1970s, Missoni had become one of the most tone-setting houses in the business. “We put together our two formations and started doing dresses and coats,” she notes, “but we kept the sportswear.” Today it’s almost unimaginable how foreign Missoni’s ideas of cross-over dress codes were to Fifties society, a time of prim and proper elegance, but it came naturally to the family. “My husband was always dressed like that,” Rosita says, contemplating the idea of athleisure. “And his friends. They were very free-thinking people.” She laughs. “The first time we went to New York we were invited by Vogue to have lunch at the Colony. And we go there, and the first thing the waiter says is, ‘The gentleman is not appropriately dressed’,” Rosita recalls.
Sneakers, £229, Missoni.com.
Rather than a shirt and tie, Tai was wearing a turtleneck. “At the time the waiters would be looking under the tables to see if women were wearing wide trousers rather than skirts,” she continues. “So, they gave a tie to my husband to wear over the turtleneck. He liked it, he thought it was funny. But it was stained so he said, ‘At least give me a new tie!’” She pauses. “We were young and had our ideas of the way fashion should be. Now, everybody can wear anything. I can’t believe there are still places that want to direct how people dress.”
In a contemporary fashion industry where sports and streetwear rule the revenues, it’s only appropriate that Missoni should reclaim a genre so key its existence. “I am delighted that we’re going back to the tradition of making real sportswear,” Rosita says. “My husband would be very proud.”
