Pupi Solari passed away at the age of 97. Born in 1927, Ligurian by birth but Milanese by adoption. Her name is linked to generations of feminine elegance of Milanese ladies (here the memory of Michela Proietti). Always active in the world of fashion together with her team made up of almost all women. «Pupi disappeared this morning at 9.16. She is calm even if she has not been conscious for a few days. A sudden worsening of her condition which was stationary until a week ago, after the pulmonary edema caused by bronchitis she had in February”, she communicates Sunny Host-Ivessich, Pupi’s daughter-in-law, has always been at his side as the shop’s buyer (read the latest interview with Corriere).
THE funerals will take place in a few days in Milan in the church of Holy Mary Secret, right in front of the historic headquarters of shop in Piazza Tommaseo. While the burial will take place in Liguria, where she was married to in Portofino in 1992 Giorgio Fattori, the former CEO of RCS Libri e Grandi Opera. «Being alongside this great woman all these years has been a unique experience. A double lesson, life and professional. Pupi had a strong, determined character. A continuous confrontation in choices and decisions. But she had a clear gaze, always projected into the future.”
In 2019 it celebrated half a century of activity. She wasn’t a designer, but she had created a style. What we could define it as truly made in Milan. Many years ago, during a meeting with students from the Catholic University, he explained how a few essential items are needed to define a style. His was tied to the white shirt. Or rather the “Pupi white shirts”, as they used to say in Milan. And Milanese ladies have never missed them in their wardrobe. Like Pupi’s clothes, there was no shortage of them in her daughters’ wardrobes. There was no social occasion or ceremony in which mothers and daughters they didn’t dress like her. In many portraits hanging in well-heeled Milanese living rooms, mothers and daughters wear clothes from her boutique, not far from the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie and Corso Magenta.
Pupi Solari with his collaborators
After an initial period in Largo Quinto Alpini, a square adjacent to the Sempione Park in Milan, where he opened a shop selling children’s collections which he named Snoopy, the reference address of Pupi Solari then becomes Piazza Tommaseo, still in the same area, where the Pupi Solari Bambino shop windows are still located today. In 2010 she was awarded the prestigious Milano Donna award, established in 2007 and which until then had been awarded to female figures who had always had a deep relationship with Milan: the soprano Mirella Freni, the architect Gae Aulenti, the legendary actress Valentina Cortese.
Pupi Solari has been a point of reference in Milan since 1969, when it began its activity. Thanks to his personal charisma and his ideas of style it defined rules which then affirmed the image of the Lombardy capital in the world. The blue and white shirts, represent his uniform. Her necks blooming from the necklines of her sweaters or jackets, framing her face, luminous with white hair, her hair gathered and tied behind her neck.
A personality so strong that it even struck a man of image like the photographer Bruce Weber. At the beginning of the 2000s, the magician of photography during a dinner party in her honor in Milan was struck not by the charm of models, but by this lady, among the distinguished guests. He introduces himself and proposes to take a portrait of her. That bright and stubborn face was sure to “hit” the lens, as they say in the jargon.
Pupi Solari’s story is one of stubbornness and an unstoppable desire to work. He said: «I started working out of necessity, that is, after the separation from Giorgio Host-Ivessich, my first husband and the move from Genoa, where I was born, to Milan. Here I opened my first shop in Largo Quinto Alpini: a winning choice. I was far from the downtown streets, out of the fray. It wasn’t easy at the beginning, but as I had understood it was the right choice.” It was 1969. Almost ten years later in 1978, the change of address. «I moved to the nearby Piazza Tommaseo, which has since been home to the Pupi Solari shops: women’s and children’s», to these it was added in 1991 Host, the men’s boutique, whose name is the first part of his children’s surname. The windows of Pupi Solari, women, children and men at this point increase and become eleven.
The shop windows are held up as an example for their rigorous creativity and elegance, which is never predictable. A multi-brand store but which declares in its choices the strong personality of those who created it, their homogeneity. It is identified as a single-brand store. Not only. First of all, Pupi Solari anticipates the fashion of “receiving”, with a small tea room inside the shop. Among his favorite clients is the actress Ornella Mutiwhile among the creatives he declared his passion for Fioruccifor which he had also worked, Romeo Gigli And Jil Sander.
In 2018, just before celebrating their 50th anniversary, they began working alongside him the eldest son Andrea, who is entrusted with the administrative management of the company, and his granddaughter Margherita who is responsible for the creative direction of the collections and the management of social media and websites, choices that give new luster to the name; always by his side daughter-in-law Sunny as a buyer. Also in 2018, at the age of 92, she decided to sell her style empire: she sold the women’s and men’s departments in Milan and the children’s store in Genoa, her hometown, to a Scottish group. The lady of made in Milan style dedicates herself totally to the Pupi Solari Bambino boutique in Milan, also in the historic Piazza Tommaseo where it is still open.
Pupi Solari’s legacy was taken up by his daughter-in-law Sunny. «Immediately after giving up the women’s and men’s stores, he continued to go to the children’s store for a while. It was his life. Then he preferred to retire. During the lockdown she isolated herself even more”, recalls her daughter-in-law. «But for me it was unacceptable that all of Pupi’s work, her way of being, the style she had created, that Made in Milan that made her proud, had not followed. So I decided to open a boutique that was a portrait of him in spirit, in the choice of garments, in the way of presenting himself. This is how the world «Sunny H» was born: my name and the initial of my husband’s surname are the denomination of this boutique in via Vincenzo Monti 36, a stone’s throw from where Pupi opened his first shop. I have put to good use the legacy of style and way of being, the life lessons of a great woman.”
