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Some legendary designers made their name on the catwalks of fashion week. For others it’s the pages of Vogue or the red carpet. Italy’s Massimo Osti took a different route. Actively avoiding the fashion world and the trappings of celebrity designers, for the last few decades of the 20th Century, with his twin labels C.P. Company and Stone Island, Osti made the streets his catwalk, everyday insiders his models, building a global cult legacy quite unlike any other.
Not that Osti would feel comfortable calling himself a fashion designer. Despite unrivalled innovation, cultural impact and commercial success making clothes, the Bologna native didn’t see his work as part of the frivolous trend-obsessed fashion world.
Osti was a technician whose medium happened to be fabric. Through tireless experimentation across 11 brands and five decades until his death in 2005, he pioneered dyeing mechanisms and crafted silhouettes that would quietly influence urban dressing for generations. Some of those brands, like Stone Island, would become globally recognised powerhouses. Others, like Boneville or Left Hand, the stuff of collectors, trading vintage jackets on Facebook groups or out-of-town lockups.
Osti launched his first label, Chester Perry (later C.P. Company) in 1971, after a fruitful period selling screen printed t-shirts in Italian nightclubs. Stone Island followed in 1982. His combined knowledge of advertising, art and culture was a fresh and exciting creative force in a nation which, although renowned for style, clung tightly to classic, conservative dress codes. The colourful, functional garments born from obsessive research into military surplus, workwear and industrial design sent shock waves around a youth desperate to form an optimistic post-war Italian identity. Puffer jackets, which until then had been made only for mountain trekking, became streetwear. Expertly designed T-shirts were worn on the beach, not just the factory floor. As the Osti-loving style tribe, the Paninari, emerged from Milan and onto the pages of magazines around Europe, the garments found a wider audience and a new spiritual home on the cold, grey streets of Britain.
The touchpaper was lit. Stone Island and C.P. Company became central to the second wave of Casual wear evolving on the UK’s terraces in the late ‘80s, as footage of Saturday afternoon riots in the media helped give the ‘Stoney’ compass badge an infamous reputation, and bundles of cultural clout. Thirty years on, in the age of social media, young football going men would still be shouting “GET THE BADGE IN!” while posing for a photo.
Osti’s list of innovations would continue to grow throughout the ‘90s, with commercial success allowing for deeper research investment. Thermo-responsive textiles, reflective coatings, steel woven fabric. ‘Urban protection’ jackets with gas masks, torches and scooters. We could fill a website just with articles about those seminal developments.
Recent years have seen Osti’s name and legacy receive widespread acclaim, as the wider fashion media finally catches up with what Working Class football fans and Italian dads have known since the ‘80s. US rappers now wear Stone Island to show their affinity to the UK’s grime scene, another subculture who took the compass badge to heart in the mid 00s, with iconic vintage jackets regularly selling for thousands online. The cult Osti built with British fans, through a shared passion for consistency and detail, remains one of the most remarkable in clothing history. A love affair between an unassuming Italian craftsman and a community of young men who appreciate quality without compromise.
Discover C.P. Company and Stone Island at Badge online now.