FLORENCE: Like psychedelic clouds, wildly patterned balloons floated over the ancestral courtyard. Among the vivid swirls of pink, purple, turquoise and lime – the graphic designs of Emilio Pucci – bounced feather-light jersey dresses.

"Joyous – and cool," said the singer Kylie Minogue, who was wearing a tiny sequined minidress and had the current Pucci designer, Matthew Williamson, on her arm; while Elizabeth Hurley incited paparazzi flashbulbs in a corseted dress by the former Pucci designer Christian Lacroix.

For a 60th birthday, last weekend’s party to celebrate Pucci’s world was as vivacious as those iconic prints. By the end of the evening, the thick stone walls of the Renaissance palazzo resonated with dance music, as guests from current celebrities to aristocratic Florentines – Corsinis, Frescobaldis and Nicolinis – took to the dance floor or viewed a small exhibition of terry-cloth beach cloaks and densely embroidered beaded gowns.

Bona Frescobaldi, in a Pucci outfit like so many guests, reminisced about sailing with Emilio on the Aegean Sea, when a jet-set friend swam toward the boat singing praises to the designer and nobleman, who led historic Florentine parades on a white horse.

Marie-Christine of Kent, with her husband, Prince Michael, remembered the pile of silk shirts in her closet that the designer would offer each season. And Hurley said that she first became aware of the designer from vintage stores and from the Marilyn Monroe auction.

"My father had amazing passion for women – the body for him was everything," said Laudomia Pucci, pointing to a 1970s bikini made entirely from globular pearls. As the maestro’s daughter, and now image director for the brand, she wore a vintage embroidered dress in quiet colors, as did her mother, the Marchesa Cristina Pucci, in a slender dress her husband had made for her 30 years before.

"It started yesterday – feeling emotional – before that we were working so hard," said Cristina Pucci, who hosted the following day an al fresco lunch at the family’s Tuscan villa, where the May sunshine bathed the swimming pool in the perfect Mediterranean blue to match the Vivara fragrance, relaunched with the refurbished brand.

Pucci has come a long way since the stylish Italian marquis, just after the war that devastated Italy, made a hooded parka and skinny ski pants for his girlfriend on the Swiss slopes. The boutique he subsequently set up in Capri in 1950 was the crucible of the jet set, offering to the heiress Gloria Guinness or to the voluptuous young Sophia Loren a new sporty ease in cropped "Capri pants," cotton poplin shirts and silk scarves. By the time Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy had adopted the style and Marilyn Monroe had filled her closet with the slinky jersey dresses, the "Emilio" logo was world famous and American clients had dubbed the designer "the Prince of Prints."

Emilio Pucci died in 1992, and the return of Pucci to the limelight came in 2000 with the purchase of 67 percent of the company by the luxury group LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton). The brand now has a span of stores from Las Vegas to Tokyo, with two more boutiques, in Bahrain and Yekaterinburg, Russia, slated for later this year.

Delphine Arnault, who said she was "representing her father" (the LVMH chairman, Bernard Arnault), was at the heart of the weekend events, alongside Pucci’s new general manager, Didier Drouet.

For Laudomia Pucci, the challenge is to take the brand beyond the prints, widely copied by fast fashion chains, and to go back to the breadth of product she remembers when she first helped her father at age 14. For the birthday, the original couture selling space was recreated, the walls paneled with 400 different shades like a paint chart, the name of each, from "celestial blue" to "Nile green," written in medieval-style script on glass vitrines.

"But you will see there is no red – Daddy worked with fuchsia," said Laudomia Pucci, whose memories range from the workers’ Christmas tree set up by a paternalist Italian family company to voyages to America – to Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York – when her father was a ball of energy and they subsisted on a carton of yogurt for lunch.

Williamson, with his eye on the vintage pieces on display in cardboard packaging and on a floaty sea-blue-paneled dress, said that his mission was to take the company from its heritage to the future.

"It’s a balance of two extremes – my job is first of all to respect what has happened and the abundant inspiration of the archives," he says. "But in order to be a contemporary fashion house, there is an interesting dynamic. I am working at how far to push and pull."