This Book on Emilio Pucci Reveals a Different Side of the Designer
- SANDRA SALIBIAN
- 11 hours ago
- 6 min read
The “Emilio Pucci: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon” book, authored by Idanna Pucci and Terence Ward, will be presented at Pitti Uomo.
MILAN — If you think you know everything about Emilio Pucci and his vibrantly colored world of swirling prints and jet-setting customers, think again.
The fashion innovator who traveled the globe and excelled at sports also flew torpedo missions in World War II, faced Nazi imprisonment and exile in Switzerland before going on to become a hallmark name in fashion, synonymous with a joyful approach to dressing.
This full spectrum of experiences is retraced in the “Emilio Pucci: The Astonishing Odyssey of a Fashion Icon” book to be presented at Pitti Uomo on Wednesday. Published by St. Martin’s Press, the book is authored by the designer’s niece Idanna Pucci and her husband and writer Terence Ward, with a foreword by Suzy Menkes.
“[We wanted to] share with the world this extraordinary character that everybody thinks they know, and yet there’s this whole other side that enlarges his character in such a way that very few fashion designers could compare,” Ward told WWD in a joint interview with Pucci.
Blending biography, history and a dash of a spy novel, the book mainly focuses on Pucci’s life before becoming a designer, revealing how he played a critical role during World War II as he risked his life to smuggle compromising documents to the Allies that were then used as key evidence in the Nuremberg trials and foundational in the development of international law.
In particular, in 1943 Mussolini’s daughter Edda Ciano reached out to her close friend Pucci for help to save both her family and the diaries of her imprisoned husband, Gian Galeazzo Ciano, who had been the minister of foreign affairs and whose documents centered on the relationship between Italy and Germany and revealed the horrors of the Third Reich. Pucci managed to smuggle his friend, children and the so-called Ciano Diaries into Switzerland, before being captured by the Gestapo.
The episode surprised even Idanna Pucci herself, who had only vague notions about her uncle’s role during the war.
“I grew up in proximity of this uncle. My father and he were just two brothers, very close but very different from each other,” said Pucci. “After the war, nobody really talked about the war. In every family, the impulse was to go forward and not speak about sad things, [to] concentrate energy into the future. So I knew very little,” she said.
That was the case until she stumbled upon “The Report of Marchese Emilio Pucci,” which her uncle wrote in Switzerland for the OSS, the precursor of the CIA. The text detailed his actions and role in the Ciano episode and remained classified by the CIA until after the designer’s death, which occurred in 1992 at age 78.
“During COVID-19, we found a reference to this report in a small self-published book in the New York Public Library,” recalled Pucci. “I was searching for something else, and then I see this reference in the bibliography of this book about the Ciano Diaries. As I saw my uncle’s name, I said to Terence: ‘This we have to find’.”
The painstaking research was unsuccessful for more than a year, but the couple “just couldn’t stop looking,” said Pucci. The turning point coincided with her intuition that the OSS archives might have been stored separately from the CIA ones. This put the co-authors on the right path, but still one filled with 538 boxes of chaos and loose categorization to browse before eventually finding the report.
Reading her uncle’s words about the suffering he and Italy at-large went through during those years inevitably had an impact on Pucci. Hence, the decision to work and co-author a book with her husband for the first time. “We knew that we could only write it together because it needed a lot of strength. First, to do the research and second, to have the style of writing which wouldn’t be journalistic but would be more literature about facts,” she said.
Previously, Pucci authored titles such as “The Lady of Sing Sing,” “Brazza in Congo,” and “The World Odyssey of a Balinese Prince” while Ward’s work ranges from memoir to geopolitical analysis and include “Searching for Hassan,” “The Guardian of Mercy,” and “The Wahhabi Code.”
Pucci said this experience taught her how to write with her husband’s style, as she credited him for the main draft of every chapter, and she would “rewrite a certain sentence, but always with him beside me.
“We’ve been together for 32 years. You have to give up whatever ego you may have and only think of the final quality. And we are lucky we don’t have this terrible ego that jeopardizes so many situations,” said Pucci.
Still, the closing part of the book hinges on Pucci’s own collection of memories about her uncle, which lighten and balance the narrative.
In particular, the pages highlight his unique talent in turning dark days into a kaleidoscopic world of beauty, becoming one of the ambassadors of a cultural renaissance and a new era of creativity in post-war Italy.
Again, it all happened by chance. An avid skier, in 1947 Emilio Pucci designed his own ski ensemble — sleek tapered pants and a hooded parka — that was shot by Harper’s Bazaar photographer Toni Frissell in Zermatt, Switzerland. Frissell asked him to design more and the following year the images ran in the magazine spearheaded by Diana Vreeland, in a page titled: “An Italian Skier Designs.” That same picture now is the book cover.
Subsequently, Lord & Taylor commissioned the brand’s founder to design an exclusive ski collection for the store. The following year, while on military leave in Capri, Pucci noticed his jet-set friends had few apparel choices for the resort and came up with an easy fashion mix of brightly colored blouses over matching capri pants. In 1950, the designer opened a store in Capri called La Canzone del Mare, or “The Sea’s Song” in English, where tony tourists could buy his resort-perfect getups, before holding his first fashion show in Florence the following year.
“It’s very Emilio Pucci to start everything by chance because his life was a sequence of incredible events, incidents that all have perhaps a preordained destiny,” said Pucci. “Nothing was planned, nothing was dictated by simple ambition but a sense that life is so much bigger than us. What makes the story as something that may inspire young people is this incredible character which is never lamenting, never complaining, never victimizing, but always forward, always imaginative and positive. We realized that he could have been the contrary, but positivity attracts positivity. It’s like a magnet for people because whether it is today or 80 years ago, people are attracted to a sense of joy.”
“For those who are thinking of a career in fashion, to read a story like this and confront a figure like this offers such positive light because what he went through and what he shared with the world are polar opposites,” added Ward.
Pucci experienced her uncle’s fashion heydays firsthand, as she has also worked at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York in his boutique in the ’60s. She recalled how he was strict but still ran the business like a family, with his 200 seamstresses working at Palazzo Pucci with him or sewing from their own homes so they didn’t have to leave their families.
Yet what impressed her the most was how he imagined and designed clothes for the woman of the future, who needed to be independent and practical as she worked and traveled. “It’s the quality and depth of the imagination. And you need that in life to survive,” said Pucci.