Pupi Solari’s eponymous clothing store, nestled in Milan’s quaint Piazza Tommaseo, is on the opposite end of town from ritzy Via Montenapoleone, where the city’s stylish sciure flock to buy the latest in high fashion. Yet a certain in-the-know crowd has shopped there for half a century.
Solari, 96, used to live next door, in Casa degli Atellani, which shares its courtyard with the Cenacolo Vinciano, home of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Up until recently, she operated a boutique in the nearby coastal city of Genoa as well, and sold men’s and women’s clothing in both shops. Over the years, Gianni Agnelli, Giorgio Armani, and members of the Borromeo and Loro Piana families have been among her roster of clients. In 2018, she decided to close all of that and exclusively sell children’s items in her Milan store—just like when she first opened up shop, 50 years ago.
Solari greets customers in the store’s tearoom in a polite but commanding way. Her silver hair is always tied back and taut, and she dresses in neutral-colored Aspesi blouses, sleek pants, and clip-on diamond earrings. “Elegance,” she tells me, “is a white shirt.”
The Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera has called Solari the “anti-diva,” and she has been known to shy away from the press. Yet, over her five-decade career in fashion, Solari has collaborated with Elio Fiorucci, befriended Valentino and Giò Ponti, and inspired many others. “She really doesn’t give a shit about trends,” says the American-born, Milan-based designer J. J. Martin, founder of La DoubleJ. “She’s just emblematic of the Milanese woman.”
Solari is a retailer, not a designer—a distinction she makes often. The items she stocks are meticulously handpicked, such as cashmere onesies for children, and absolutely no rhinestones, ever. “One day, Gianni Agnelli told me I was a good fashion designer. My husband replied that I was simply an excellent shopkeeper,” she once told Il Corriere della Sera. “It was the best compliment possible.”
She may not be a designer, but she’s been unable to escape becoming a brand, and an extremely sought-after one at that. People who shop at Pupi Solari invariably say, “I bought Pupi Solari.”
“One day, Gianni Agnelli told me I was a good fashion designer. My husband replied that I was simply an excellent shopkeeper. It was the best compliment possible.”
Despite ruling over the city’s fashion crowd for half a century, Solari isn’t Milanese. She was born in 1927 in Genoa, and speaks with a slight Ligurian accent. “It was such a wonderful place to grow up,” she says. “But when I was 13, the war changed everything.” (Due to its strategic importance as a port city, Genoa was heavily bombed by the Allies starting in 1940.)
In the 1950s, she moved to Milan and married Giorgio Host-Ivessich, an architect who at the time was working with Ponti. “They were the years of the economic boom, the years of creativity…. It was an extraordinary time,” she says of the postwar era, when Milan hadn’t become a fashion capital yet. Prada was still specializing in leather luggage. Giorgio Armani was a salesman at La Rinascente. Gianni Versace was a teenager.
Solari opened her store in 1969, when she was 42, to support herself and her two children during her separation from Host-Ivessich. “He told me, ‘Now you have to fend for yourself,’” Solari said to Il Corriere della Sera.
“I wondered about my talents,” Solari tells me. “I realized that I might have a bit of good taste, and, loving the world of children, I opened my first tiny store.”
She opened in an inconspicuous storefront on Largo V Alpini, just across from the city’s Parco Sempione, and called the shop Snoopy. “There were only 17 meters on the upper floor and 100 meters of storage on the lower floor,” she says. On Saturdays, she would host movie screenings for the children in the area, attempting to keep her spirits up. Even so, the hours were grueling, and business was tough. “I cried 12 hours a day,” she told Il Corriere della Sera.
The tides were turning in Italy. The postwar heyday of the 1950s and 60s was over, and in the early 70s, Milan became the epicenter of the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) uprising, which saw a Marxist group kidnapping industrialists, robbing banks, and firebombing warehouses.
It was a difficult time, Solari says. Yet she forged on, stocking her store with bright and tasteful things. “In 1970, when I was 14, she helped me make my first dress—red with puffed sleeves and an embroidered corset,” Luisa Beccaria, a Milanese designer, recalls. “And she was the only person who sold Start-Rite, these divine English shoes in blue, bordeaux, and pink.”
In 1978, Solari took over the storefront she owns to this day, under her own name. The clientele grew to include Milan’s fashionable ladies and, soon, fashion luminaries. Between 1976 and 1978, she collaborated with Fiorucci on Fioruccino, his children’s line. “We were so different in theory—he was creative at the highest level, and I was conservative,” Solari says. “But we laughed because he always dressed in blue. Deep down, he was actually more conservative than I was.”
Pupi Solari greets customers in the store’s tearoom in a polite but commanding way. “Elegance,” she tells me, “is a white shirt.”
In the 1980s, Solari married Giorgio Fattori, a reporter working under Agnelli at the newspaper publisher Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera. She befriended Giancarlo Giammetti, Valentino’s boyfriend, and in 1981 accompanied Valentino on a trip to New York.
Yet Solari stayed out of the spotlight. “We went to parties out of duty,” she told Il Corriere della Sera. “We preferred to escape to the Portofino mountains, surrounded by friends, at home. I am sociable, but not worldly. I attended fashion shows only because I was obliged.”
By the early 90s, she’d opened women’s and men’s sections, and expanded her store to comprise 11 windows on the piazza.
Yet, despite the expansion, her clothes maintained their comforting uniformity. “The clothes in my shop are not ‘classic,’ but ‘classy,’” Solari told Women’s Wear Daily in 1997. “They’re very linear, definitely not erotic. There is a group of women in Milan with a more provocative style, but they go to Dolce & Gabbana or Gucci, not to me.”
The 90s cemented Solari’s status as a fixture of the city’s fashion scene. In 2002, she attended a Condé Nast dinner party hosted by Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani for the photographer Bruce Weber. “He was captivated by her almost regal presence,” the journalist Cesare Cunaccia remembers. “With her chiseled features and captivating, sparkling eyes, [Weber] immediately sought permission to photograph her.”
“She really doesn’t give a shit about trends. She’s just emblematic of the Milanese woman.”
“Pupi is a force of nature,” Beatrice Borromeo, Princess of Monaco, says.
“As as a child,” says Margherita Missoni, the designer of Maccapani and heiress of the Missoni fashion house, “my greatest ambition was to have a ‘normal life,’ invite my mom’s friends for tea, and dress up like Pupi Solari.”
“Pupi Solari, for me, represents the very essence of Milanese style,” Armani says. “Her discretion is rich in its nuances, her elegance is never ostentatious. I have always admired her for her enlightened choices as a merchant as well as for her personal style, which is both sober and vibrant. Pupi and her work are the very definition of ‘timeless’: a quality that I have always aspired to, and that sets her apart from trends.”
Despite her success, Solari finds that the most important thing in life is to stay grounded. “I don’t like skyscrapers,” she once told Il Corriere della Sera. “When I was little, I wanted to be a doorman because I like to be on the ground floor.”
And the most important thing in fashion?, I ask.
“The person,” she replies simply.
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail