Queen of hot pants, fashion designer Mariuccia Mandelli, remembered

Mariuccia Mandelli, an Italian fashion designer who electrified the catwalk with short shorts known as hot pants, knitwear whimsically emblazoned with animals, and trouser suits for the modern working woman, has died at her home in Milan, aged 90.

Italian media which reported her death did not say what she died of.

Mandelli was regarded as royalty in Milan, the fashion capital of Italy, for more than half a century. A onetime elementary school teacher, she launched Krizia, her fashion label, in the mid-1950s, drawing its name from a Platonic dialogue about female vanity.

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A decade later, still relatively unknown, she stunned the insular Italian design world by claiming an important fashion prize for a collection presented at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. The award identified her as both a significant talent and a maverick: unlike many of her contemporaries, she had eschewed wild colours in favour of black and white.

Blacks, browns and creams – the shades of Italian coffees, the San Francisco Chronicle once observed – remained prominent in her palette for years. Her independent streak, likewise, lasted. Umberto Eco, the Italian author and philosopher, quoted in W Magazine, observed that Mandelli “invents the taste of her own public”.

She designed clothing for children and for men, and the Krizia line included jewellery, fragrances and champagne. But she was best known for women’s wear that was seen as contemporary and daring, a reflection of the feminist movement that coincided with Mandelli’s rise as a force in design.

“Women at the time expressed the will to change the system,” she once told Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily. Designers, she said, took their lead. “I tried to liberate women by eliminating what was superfluous, adapting clothing to daily life.”

She used fabrics that were mainstays of men’s clothing, such as pinstripe wools. She favoured trousers – whether jodhpurs, stirrups or billowy knickerbockers – over the more traditionally feminine skirt. And she made innovative use of pleats to project both power and style.