MILAN, Italy, May 9 (UPI) -- Italian fashion designer Ottavio Missoni has died in Milan, his family said. He was 92.
Italy's ANSA news agency confirmed his Thursday death, but did not report the exact cause of it.
The one-time Olympic runner founded the Missoni fashion house in 1953 with his wife, Rosita. Together, they designed and manufactured distinctive colorful knitwear with zig-zag patterns for decades.
"I've never done what was fashionable," Missoni once told the fashion publication WWD. "I didn't want to work with preset schemes and I paint my own way."
This is the second sad event to hit the Missoni family this year.
The designer's eldest son Vittorio, the 58-year-old chief executive officer of the Italian fashion house, and his wife, Maurizia Castiglioni, were aboard a small plane that went missing off the Venezuelan coast in January.
