La Perla entrepreneur Alberto Masotti dies at 90

Alberto Masotti, the longtime La Perla leader, has died at 90 in Bologna, the Italian city where he was born.

He trained as a doctor but joined his family’s lingerie business, founded by his mother, and became its president in 1981.

Under his leadership, La Perla expanded internationally and grew from a small craft business into a luxury fashion group with as many as 2,000 employees in the 1980s.

Masotti sold control of the group in 2007–08, and the company later went through financial trouble and several changes of ownership.

He founded Fashion Research Italy in 2015 to help small and medium-sized fashion businesses and preserve the industry’s heritage.

The foundation holds a digitised archive of more than 30,000 historic designs and was preparing a conference on fashion and artificial intelligence for the following week.