HUNTING & GATHERING

In the Missoni clan's longtime Alpine retreat, family matriarch Rosita's love of foraged mushrooms, folksy flea market finds, and, of course, bold colors and patterns lives on

- LAURA MAY TODD

Mushrooms never grow in isolation—to see one is to assume a vast network of mycelium sprouting unseen nearby. In the holiday apartment of Rosita Missoni, the late founder of the fashion brand Missoni, in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, such fungal figures abound. The motifs appear everywhere: rows of toadstools atop the fireplace's stone mantel; scientific illustrations mounted in thin wood frames on the walls; a set of upholstered ottomans in the shape of spotted, red-capped fly agarics—psychedelic perches fit for Alice's Wonderland.

Rosita and her husband, Ottavio, along with other members of the Missoni clan, began visiting this mountainous region of southern Switzerland in the 1960s. “My grandparents started to come, and then my aunties and cousins. At the end, everybody bought a house,” recalls her daughter Angela Missoni, creative director of Missoni from 1997 to 2021.

Here in the heart of the Alps, Rosita, who passed away in January, fully indulged her passion for mushrooms and foraging. On late summer mornings—dressed in her mountain uniform, a Banana Republic safari vest layered over an old favorite shirt with a kerchief knotted neatly at her neck—she would wake early to climb the steep mountain slopes in search of her prize: fat, umbrella-shaped porcini and feather-like golden chanterelles. “She even had a specific retractable knife with a brush to clean them,” remembers her granddaughter Margherita Maccapani Missoni, the creative director of fashion brand Maccapani. “So the spores would fall on the forest floor and new mushrooms would grow.”