Ideas from Massimo Osti

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Considering it’s made from a single piece of canvas, it would be hard to pass blame on someone who overlooked the Zeltbahn. The book also features Osti’s textile innovations, such as the iconic ice jacket and reflective fabrics.

The book tells its story through images of Osti’s most important designs: his innovations in garment dyeing, his development of new fabrics inspired by the tarps truck drivers use to batten down loads, and othermaterials such as rubber flax, the “Ice Jacket” that changes colors with the temperature, or “technowool,” a wool and nylon wear-resistant “urban armor. A remarkable item, I wanted one so very badly, and in hindsight, I should have bought what became an instant collector’s item. Berardi proclaims that this “was our communal strut towards a future, a future which already no longer existed. For non-Italians it can be hard to understand how Italian identity is a composite, excitedly fragmented affair, not monolithic. Back in the early 1980s, with business booming, Osti had sold a majority stake in Stone Island and CP to Carlo Rivetti, the owner of Sportswear Company.His genius was then to take those ideas and remould them into something totally new and modern in look and feel. Working intensively with fabric treatments like dyes and stonewashes, he mastered the art of giving clothes an intensely worn, but not destroyed patina. He was one of the first to take screen printing to clothing and pioneered countless new innovations, ranging from garment dying to rubber wool. Throughout his professional life, despite introducing groundbreaking innovations in techniques such as garment dyeing or wool brushing, despite using daring heat-sensitive and highly reflective fabrics, despite turning the humble down jacket into a urban staple when most people were still only using it for skiing, and despite almost immediately gaining a cult following – even if the object of the cult was the product, not its designer – Massimo Osti was never considered as one of the Italian megastars, such as Valentino, Gianni Versace or Gianfranco Ferré.

Massimo Osti collected something like 35,000 pieces during his career, and 5,000 of them are still preserved in his archive. For centuries, after the fall of the Roman Empire, we have been a land of little commons and little feuds, and we have always nurtured our genius loci with immense pride, trying to be as different as possible from our neighbours just a few kilometres away. Only history can tell what will survive, of course, and even history sometimes succumbs to the ephemeral, yet originals are both rare and easy to spot. In 1983, a Zoltan cape-tent originally made for the German Army was reworked into Zeltbahn, a Stone Island gem, all askew buttoning and flowing volume, with bright Tela Stella adding a bold twist; in 1988, Japanese gas masks inspired the goggle lenses incorporated into the hood of the CP Company Millemiglia jacket, an immediate hit.

For years there has been a relative dearth of literature devoted to Massimo Osti, Stone Island and C. Massimo Osti is one, a designer who earned his right to join the pantheon alongside Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Giorgio Armani. Throughout the book you are shown the experimentation with fabrics and dyeing techniques, as well as going through the stages of Osti’s life, following his change from graphic designer to fashion innovator. It also allows unused or leftover light shades to be re-dyed and treated for later seasons, reducing the amount of waste created. Stone Island evolved into an enduring cult, one still alive today in particular in Britain, thanks to its popularity with football fans.

In the late 60’s through to the 70’s this was the fashion and garments were often made from tightly cut, unyielding materials. The book tells its story through images of Osti's most important designs: his innovations in garment dyeing, his development of new fabrics inspired by the tarps truck drivers use to batten down loads, and other materials such as rubber flax, the "Ice Jacket" that changes colors with the temperature, or "Technowool," a wool and nylon wear-resistant "urban armor. Particularly as it was the 1980s, when fame was a social must, and swimming against the current required nerves and guts. Massimo Osti’s oeuvre remains so relevant today that it almost needs to be written about in the present tense to be properly dissected. Not only does “Ideas from Massimo Osti” widely and clearly illustrate the stylist and his textile inventions, it also emphasises the unquestionable capacity of this Italian pioneer to influence generations of designers with his visionary power.In fact, you might well be wearing something he invented a long time ago, even though he didn’t actually design it – and that is a genuine achievement.