Alberto Masotti

Alberto Masotti died in Bologna on the morning of 23 October 2026, aged 90. The news was reported the same day by Il Resto del Carlino, ANSA, Il Sole 24 Ore, la Repubblica and Corriere di Bologna. No cause of death was made public.

La Perla said it mourned the son of its founder, adding that with entrepreneurial vision and a deep commitment to the family's tailoring tradition he had helped transform a Bologna atelier into an internationally celebrated maison, and that together with his wife Olga and later his daughter Anna he had written a fundamental chapter of its history. The mayor of Bologna, Matteo Lepore, offered the city's condolences and recalled with affection his sincere closeness to the women workers who had mobilised to save the company. Funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of the first reports.

Alberto Masotti was born in Bologna on 13 March 1936, the son of Ada Masotti, a seamstress who in 1954 opened a small corsetry and tailoring workshop in the city. He studied medicine at the University of Bologna and in 1960 graduated in medicine and surgery with top marks. Rather than continue as a doctor at the Sant'Orsola hospital, he decided to join his mother's growing business, bringing a more entrepreneurial outlook to what was then a family atelier.

In a 2024 interview with Il Resto del Carlino he described how the company got its name. At a family meeting about modernising the business, then called L'Ape, he told his parents about an early Technicolor film he had seen at the Cinema Medica, in which divers in Hawaii surfaced with a perfect white pearl. The idea was approved, and the workshop became La Perla.

Masotti worked his way through the family company and became its president in 1981, a post he held for 26 years. Under his leadership La Perla grew from a respected Bologna corsetry maker into an international luxury brand, admired for its craftsmanship and lace work, with boutiques and runway shows abroad. The group added swimwear, a ready to wear line launched for autumn and winter 1999 to 2000, and fragrances, and acquired or created labels including GrigioPerla, Malizia, AnnaClub, Oceano Aquasuit and Joelle. His wife, Olga Cantelli Masotti, had designed and supervised the swimwear and lingerie collections since the 1970s, and their daughter Anna took charge of communication.

He held several roles in Italian industry. He was named a Cavaliere del Lavoro by the President of the Republic in 1995, was vice president of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, chaired the board of arbitrators of the luxury association Altagamma and sat on the board of Unindustria Bologna. In 2004, for La Perla's fiftieth anniversary, the company sponsored an exhibition on the Bolognese baroque painter Elisabetta Sirani, and that year he and Anna received the La Kore fashion award in Taormina.

Facing around 70 million euros of debt, the Masotti family sold first 70 per cent and then all of La Perla to the San Francisco private equity firm JH Partners in 2007. The company was sold to Silvio Scaglia in 2013 and to Lars Windhorst's Sapinda, later Tennor, in 2018, years marked by financial trouble and industrial disputes, before Peter Kern bought it in 2025.

After leaving La Perla he chaired Nute Partecipazioni, a property and industrial redevelopment company, and invested in solar energy plants. On 11 May 2015 he founded the non profit Fondazione Fashion Research Italy, which offers training, consultancy and exhibition space to small and medium sized fashion companies and runs a master's programme with the University of Bologna. In 2024 he published La nostra Perla, a book of more than 300 pages on the brand's history, with Minerva Edizioni, and in 2025 he founded Am.Ai, which uses generative AI to rework designs from the foundation's archive into silk scarves and accessories.

Masotti was married to Olga Cantelli, the designer behind La Perla's collections for decades, and their daughter, Anna Masotti, worked alongside them in the company. He lived in Bologna throughout his life and remained closely identified with the city. Speaking about the Am.Ai project in his late eighties, he said that some people told him he was mad to start such a venture at his age, but that he saw it as a spark of the future.

Masotti is remembered as the man who took La Perla from a Bologna workshop to the world while keeping its production rooted in the city. His Fondazione Fashion Research Italy continues to train young designers and preserve one of Italy's largest digital textile archives, and his book La nostra Perla records the history of a brand that remains a symbol of Italian craftsmanship.