The Year of Magical Thinking
Last week Angela Missoni took a walk in the garden of her house in Sumirago, a snug town in Italy about an hour northwest of Milan. After a month in isolation, a difficult morning on Zoom and a steady drumbeat of bad tidings for business, she needed some air.
“You can imagine the kind of board meetings we have been having,” said Ms. Missoni, the creative director of a label founded by her parents, Ottavio and Rosita, in 1953. “It has been kind of intense.”
Ms. Missoni is a charismatic woman with an easy smile, a mane of dark curls and a disarming earth mother air. Yet she is also a hardheaded businesswoman, one who has driven the global growth of her family enterprise.
She is not, in other words, a woo-woo.
And yet when, on her walk in the garden, she spotted a four-leaf clover in the grass, she was struck by a premonition, she said. Despite the gloom, the grim economic forecast, the generalized terrors harassing a world consumed by coronavirus, all, she felt, would be well.
“To have found one right after this meeting, I suddenly thought, ‘OK, that’s a very good sign,’” Ms. Missoni, 62, said by phone. “You know, as soon as you smile, already your whole body is benefiting from your state of mind.”