View all Latest New This Week Latest Sneakers Latest Launch Latest Lifestyle Latest Kids' Balmain Casablanca Cole Buxton Dime Folk JW Anderson Maharishi Neighborhood Norse Projects Universal Works WTAPS Y-3 OUR PICKS Bestsellers The Japan Edit The Outerwear Edit END. P. Company, amongst others, as well as the most important advertising work executed by Massimo for these brands, but also a lesser-known side of the man's work: his political commitment and his many ventures into other professional arenas. Ideas From Massimo Osti is a must-have for lovers of sportswear, who want to learn more about the highly respected designer who brought us some of the most iconic pieces of clothing and materials. That’s when, amidst the elements, they witnessed something both “disquieting and beautiful”: according to Goggi, a “tableau of fluctuating colors” spread across the deck of the Guapa, oozing from the jackets in a kind of “fluo mix.

It’s no wonder that Osti, with his love of all things functional, was drawn to the design and included it in his first collection for Stone Island. For Stone Island, among the first were the Paninari, perhaps the only indigenous Italian subculture.Osti managed the balance of material and immaterial, of product-making and communication with acumen, smartness and a coherence that came from his Italian outlook. A cult inspires the notion that the thing you worship is singular,’ says Max Pearmain, ‘and to my eye Osti is one of a kind. I would definitely put him in the same league as Helmut Lang,’ says stylist Max Pearmain, who is a long-time fan of Osti’s work.

The goggles on the hood felt almost like Blade Runner; it was all performance-art Mutoid Waste Company, yet the jacket’s tobacco-brown fabric’s lived-in patina made it look easy to wear. The book has been written with images of his most important designs, with the evidence of his military inspirations and other objects from the archive: sketches, photocopies, scraps of fabric, buttons, accessories. Ideas from Massimo Osti” is a 412-page monograph published by Damiani, the outcome of four years’ work to celebrate one of the most famous protagonists of Italian fashion, the father of Sportswear and such brands as Stone Island, C.The more painterly CP Company and CP Collection became the uniforms of choice for the artistic and creative communities. 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. Take the wonderful Tela Stella, a stonewashed canvas based upon truck tarpaulins and impregnated with resins and aged with enzyme washes, which was the material of choice for the first three Stone Island collections.

Four years in the making, the book is a veritable treasure trove – a beautiful production, sumptuously photographed, full of iconic images and containing many previously unpublished images and stories. While there was a free-wheeling inventiveness to his work, it never came at the detriment of function, which Massimo Osti considered essential; every little detail had a reason, from a dart placed mysteriously on an elbow or a ridiculous number of pockets. As Osti once said, “I like to play with forms which don’t belong to the history of the 20-year-olds of today using materials which were unknown to the 20-year-olds of yesteryear.Used by various armies through the 19th century, the simple but versatile canvas can be used in numerous ways. 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.

His garments, as a result, embodied a reassuring brand of straightforwardness – they felt like design objects, not silly fashion pieces. Massimo Osti is one, a designer who earned his right to join the pantheon alongside Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Giorgio Armani. As Berardi points out, “the production of Massimo Osti matured in this linguistic climate which produced objects to underline a function and at the same time negate it, dissolve it, and mock, in a certain sense, the function itself. His spirit continues to live through Stone Island and CP Company who are constantly developing on his works from thirty or more years ago but it would be criminal to forget his other works with brands such as Left Hand and Boneville.The most important of these characters is Massimo Osti, because he was the one that founded the brand in 1982. He reinvented the once-codified iconography of parkas, field jackets, riding coats and blousons, which he constantly spliced, dissected, reassembled – but never distorted.