In October last year, Italian news agency Ansa reported that the bodies of Vittorio Missoni, his partner Maurizia Castiglioni and two friends and two crew members, who went missing after their aircraft disappeared into Venezuelan waters on January 4 2013, had been found.
News in November subsequently determined that the identity of Castiglioni, the pilot and co-pilot, had, in fact, been officially identified. Yet, one year on, the body of the heir to the Italian fashion house remains missing.
The Missoni family's personal search continues, as Vittorio's sister, Angela, tells Style that her mother recently accompanied her to Venezuela to give DNA, should the plane wreckage recovery uncover more bodies.
Speaking of the family trauma, Angela, who oversees Misssoni's ready-to-wear line, describes how she took the family helm during the crisis. "I was the one who was keeping it all together for reasons I didn't know. We put the net around them all," she says of her mourning relatives. Asked how she personally gathered the strength to carry on, Vittorio's sister could only waver.
With Vittorio, the fashion house's marketing director, missing and herself and brother Luca, who manages Missoni's archives, nearing their Sixties, it is Angela's daughter, Margherita, that that family are pinning the brand's creative hopes on.
"It is her passion, and she has the strength. She is a leader," Angela says of her daughter, who gave birth to her first child, Otto, in September.
While Margherita had previously pursued a career as an actress in New York, her decision to return to the family business marks Angela's stalwart belief that it is the familial values that keeps Missoni, the brand, going, even after the death of the label's head, Ottavio, in May.
