Ideas from Massimo Osti

Product Information

Ideas from Massimo Osti assembles sketches, photocopies, scraps of fabric, buttons, accessories and images of the celebrities that promoted his creations, from Bono and Madonna to Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper. Written and edited by Osti's wife Daniela Facchinato, Ideas from Massimo Osti includes over 1000 images, (including 175 newly photographed individual garments from throughout his career), never seen before sketches, notes, dyeing tests, fabric samples and interviews. 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.

An innovator and creative genius, Massimo Osti’s innovations rewrote the rules of the casual menswear industry and created the fabrics of today. I used to actively look for his designs and my memories are full both of pieces I did purchase – the field jackets, the incredibly supple garment-dyed shirts, and the ruby-red Shetland wool CP Company cardigan that I bought in 1992 as a freshman at university and still wear today – as well as pieces I never managed to get my hands on. 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. When working on a piece, he rummaged throughout his archive, pillaging anything that took his fancy – a sleeve here, a pocket there – and collaged it back together into something new.Working intensively with fabric treatments like dyes and stonewashes, he mastered the art of giving clothes an intensely worn, but not destroyed patina.

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. He reinvented the once-codified iconography of parkas, field jackets, riding coats and blousons, which he constantly spliced, dissected, reassembled – but never distorted. In the early days of Stone Island, Massimo Osti spent a lot of time working on a material that seemed more suited to the military.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. This second section closely examines each of Massimo's most important inventions in the world of fabrics, from the epochal industry-shifting intuition of garment dyeing to lesser known early Stone Island fabrics such as JJ23 to the legendary Raso Gommato, Ice Jacket and Reflective, to later high-tech subtleties such as Tecnowool. Stone Island’s ‘Archivio’, published to commemorate the brand’s 30 th anniversary, is featured elsewhere in this blog – here we take a look at ‘Ideas from Massimo Osti’.

Ken-Tonio Yamamoto is a director, filmmaker, and visual media artist based in Berlin and if you've been following brands like Stone Island, ACRONYM, and Nike, you most definitely have seen his work before. Massimo Osti’s oeuvre remains so relevant today that it almost needs to be written about in the present tense to be properly dissected. Featuring unseen images, sketches, dyeing tests and interviews, the book delves into the archive of Osti with tributes from some of the most honoured names in fashion, including Sir Paul Smith, Errolson Hugh, William Gibson and the late legendary Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani.Massimo Osti is one, a designer who earned his right to join the pantheon alongside Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Giorgio Armani. 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. Stone Island evolved into an enduring cult, one still alive today in particular in Britain, thanks to its popularity with football fans. While the brand has used different methods to achieve this modularity, the Dutch Rope system seems to be the favourite among devotees.

For years there has been a relative dearth of literature devoted to Massimo Osti, Stone Island and C. Osti put every design and material through rigorous and continual experimentation: under his instruction, his team tested and re-tested every last fiber used through rubber-coating, emery-brushing, resining, siliconing, oil finishing, bonding, and dying (the latter, with the help of in-house chemists).It might be more time consuming than a zip or buttons, but it is so incredible unique that there could be no other brand to implement it.