Missoni

Sonia Rykiel is the name usually given to 1970s knitwear, and she's covered in her own entry - but her story is about fit and the body, while Missoni's is about colour and pattern. Put the two side by side and you've got the two halves of why knitwear became so fashionable in this decade.

Missoni was a husband-and-wife business. Ottavio Missoni was a former athlete - he had run the 400-metre hurdles for Italy at the 1948 London Olympics - who had a small knitwear workshop making tracksuits. Rosita Jelmini came from a family that made shawls and embroidered fabrics. They married in 1953 and started working together in northern Italy, first making knitwear for department stores and other labels, then under their own name. Their big technical advantage was machinery: they used Raschel knitting machines, originally designed for things like shawls, to produce the bold zigzags, flame stitches, and waves of colour that became their trademark, often with space-dyed yarns that changed colour along their length.

Their big fashion moment came with a scandal. At a show in Florence in 1967, Rosita realised that the models' bras were showing through the fine knit, so she asked them to go without. Under the stage lights, the clothes turned almost see-through, and the house was not invited back the next season. But the attention helped, and by the end of the 1960s the influential Vogue editor Diana Vreeland was championing them. In the 1970s they became one of the key names in Italian fashion.

What I love about Missoni is its attitude to pattern. A typical 1970s look put a zigzag cardigan over a striped top and a patterned skirt in related colours, and somehow it all worked, because the colours had been planned together. They treated knitwear as a system of mix-and-match pieces rather than single garments, which fit the decade's new way of dressing. Their knits were also soft, light, and easy to wear, suiting the unstructured, relaxed mood of the time. They helped make Milan a serious fashion city, and a Missoni zigzag is still one of the most recognisable patterns in fashion - a very 1970s idea that has never quite gone out of style.