Ideas from Massimo Osti

Product Information

An innovator and creative genius, Massimo Osti’s innovations rewrote the rules of the casual menswear industry and created the fabrics of today. Massimo Osti was a man of ideas, full of concepts that mattered, not layers of varnish over nothing – and he worked hard, if playfully, to make them happen. 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. The piece differs from the original design by adding a hood and wide cuffs for additional elemental protection.

It comes as no surprise that the first academic ‘interfaculty’ dedicated to arts, music and performing arts – named DAMS and with Umberto Eco on the staff – opened in Bologna, attracting renegades from all over the country. Re-organized by his family members, the archive based in Bologna now counts on a collection of more than 5. Daniela Facchinato, wife of Massimo Osti, is a photographer and journalist who collaborated with Edizioni Cond Nast for ten years and shot, amongst others the international campaigns of C.collaging bits and pieces into wholly new shapes, to really care about flaunting his own lifestyle for promotional reasons or pontificating about fashion with a capital F and hogging the limelight. Ideas from Massimo Osti – published by Damiani Bologna – explores a catalytic turning point in men’s fashion. P. Company and Left Hand and inventor of the industry-shifting garment dyeing technique, Raso Gommato and numerous other fabrics still in use today, 20-30 years on; of the intellectual designer who worked from Bologna all his life, inspired as much by the 35000 piece historical garment archive he assembled in his studio as the unique artistic and political ferment of the city throughout the '70s, '80s. 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 genius was then to take those ideas and remould them into something totally new and modern in look and feel.

Crowned the most important man of 1990s menswear by Arena Homme +, Massimo Osti (1944–2005) was one of the most respected and imitated designers of his generation, whose innovations confounded the rules of the industry and created the fabrics of today. The system was inspired by the fastenings on horse riding chaps produces in Italy and Osti's passion for maritime sailing. Each piece is unique and unrepeatable and the differences between one garment and the other are a peculiar feature of the product itself” – Taken from a CP Company tag. 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. 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.We are indebted to the Bologna-born designer, active from the Seventies to the first decade of the third Millennium, for the invention of the garment dyeing technique, of rubberised satin and countless fabrics still in use after thirty years. The book traces his story through images of Osti’s most important designs: his innovations in garment dyeing, his development of new fabrics, such as Tela Stella, inspired by the tarpaulin used to cover loads on lorries, and other materials such as rubber flax, the colour changing “Ice Jacket”, or “Technowool,” a wool and nylon wear-resistant “urban armour. P. Company and Stone Island, of one of the most respected and imitated designers of his generation (crowned the most important man of 90s menswear by Arena Homme+), whose innovations confounded the rules of the industry and created the fabrics of today. He reinvented the once-codified iconography of parkas, field jackets, riding coats and blousons, which he constantly spliced, dissected, reassembled – but never distorted.

After four years in the making, the highly anticipated second edition of Ideas From Massimo Osti has landed at Aphrodite in paperback form. Osti collected over 35,000 historical pieces throughout his career, which he kept in a large warehouse and bestowed incredible value on them when envisioning new collections. By the mid-1990s, he was finding being both a designer and an entrepreneur gruelling, so he walked away from it all. Particularly as it was the 1980s, when fame was a social must, and swimming against the current required nerves and guts. It feels and looks expensive – which it is – so it is a status symbol, but not in a flashy here-today-gone-tomorrow way.Working intensively with fabric treatments like dyes and stonewashes, he mastered the art of giving clothes an intensely worn, but not destroyed patina.