Ada Masotti

Ada Masotti was the Bologna dressmaker and corsetiere who founded the Italian lingerie house La Perla in 1954. She started with a small workshop in her home city, trained as a corset maker, and ran the company until her son took over in 1981. Little else about her life is on the public record, which makes the company itself the best evidence of what she did.

A corsetiere's workshop in 1950s Bologna

Italian sources describe Masotti as a "sarta e corsettiera", a seamstress and corset maker, and that pairing explains the early product. A corsetiere knows how to cut, bone and fit a garment that has to hold its shape against the body. A dressmaker knows how fabric falls. Masotti brought both trades to lingerie at the moment Italy's postwar boom was creating a new market for well-made clothing.

Bologna was not Milan. It had no fashion weeks and no couture houses of international standing. What Emilia-Romagna did have was a dense base of small garment and knitwear workshops, and La Perla grew out of that industrial setting rather than out of a salon.

The red velvet box behind the name La Perla

The name came from packaging. The first collections were presented in a box lined with red velvet, built like a jeweler's case, and the garment inside was meant to be read as the pearl. The company has kept the idea of lingerie as something closer to jewelry than to underwear ever since.

Ada Masotti's embroidery vocabulary

Masotti's reputation rests on handwork. The Italian record credits her with using Cornely machine embroidery, macrame, silk soutache and the old Italian technique of ricamo a frastaglio, a cutwork embroidery in which fabric is cut away around stitched motifs. These are dressmaker's and embroiderer's methods, not the standard tools of corset factories.

Under her direction the house moved beyond the white, black and flesh tones that dominated lingerie of the period. In the 1960s it produced colorful, floral and checked lingerie and made its first bikinis and swimsuits. The 1970s brought the product most associated with the house for a generation, a soft triangle bra in silk jersey, a minimal shape that suited the unstructured clothes of the decade.

Handing over to Alberto in 1981

In 1981 direction of the company passed to her son, Alberto Masotti, a medical graduate of the University of Bologna. He gave creative direction to Olga Cantelli Masotti, who had already been designing collections, and spent the next quarter century building La Perla into an international brand.

The family sold the company in October 2008 to the San Francisco private equity firm JH Partners. Silvio Scaglia and Pacific Global Management bought it at auction in July 2013 for 69 million euros, and Lars Windhorst's Sapinda Group acquired it in February 2018. In February 2024 La Perla Manufacturing, the Bologna production company, was declared insolvent. In 2025 the American businessman Peter Kern bought the brand and the Bologna plant, and the atelier reopened that September.

Seven decades on, the part of the business that survived every change of owner is the one Masotti built first: a workroom in Bologna that knows how to make lingerie by hand.

Last updated October 7, 2026