Ottavio Missoni, founder of the global family fashion empire that spawned the no-bra look and revolutionised textile patterns with its trademark bold stripes and zig-zag patterns, died yesterday aged 92.

A company spokeswoman said Missoni died during the night in the northern town of Sumirago, at the family home next to the company’s factory. He had been recently hospitalised for heart problems.

“When I think of Missoni, I like to paraphrase a song by Mina: ‘colours, colours, colours’,” said Milan mayor Giuliano Pisapia.

Pisapia, likening Missoni’s designs to a rainbow, praised his cheerful disposition and said the company had made a major contribution to raising the global profile of all things made in Italy.

Missoni, who was born of Italian parents in what is now Dubrovnik, Croatia, founded the company with his wife Rosita, whom he met while competing in the 1948 London Olympics, where he ran the 400-metre hurdles. His promising early athletic career was interrupted by World War II. Missoni, fighting on the Italian side in the Battle of El Alamein, was captured by the British and held as a prisoner of war for four years in Egypt.

The pair married in 1953 and made track suits in a small workshop near Rosita’s home village, and later presented their first knitwear collection in Milan in 1958, just at the beginning of what came to be known as Italy’s economic miracle.

“We started making a profit after 10 years of activity and that day I felt like the richest man in the world,” Missoni said.