C.P. Company to Launch Massimo Osti Studio, Looking Back to Look Ahead
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MILAN — In 2022, the Italian outerwear brand C.P. Company unveiled an exhibition in Milan that retraced its 50-year history, delving into its textile-driven and innovative heritage with a selection of more than 70 items drawn from its 30,000-piece archive.
That deep dive was a celebration of the legacy left by C.P. Company’s founder Massimo Osti, a maverick designer and fashion entrepreneur who died in 2005.
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Now C.P Company will introduce a spin-off label, called Massimo Osti Studio, on Wednesday during Paris Fashion Week. It’s poised to serve as a “sandbox, or playground” for experimentation, in the words of Lorenzo Osti, son of Massino and company president.
“The project stemmed from two crossing trajectories, the first one is personal and has to do with my father’s legacy. My sister and I have been busy over the past years promoting his work to new generations. He shaped a modus operandi in fashion that was deeply different from what was happening [back in the 1970s when C.P. Company was established],” Osti said.
“The risk is that this knowhow and way of doing things get lost. It’s a way of doing business opposite to fashion’s traditional approach; it never stemmed from a concept, an idea or inspiration that trickled down to products….On the contrary, it was always fueled [the other way around], from archival pieces and textures or fabrics, then copy-pasted into new garments. For me it’s important to carry on this legacy,” he added.
After building the Massimo Osti archive and publishing a book dedicated to his prolific career, Lorenzo and his sister Agata wanted to honor their father’s forward-looking agenda. “His aim was to always look ahead, creating something that didn’t exist,” Osti said.
Massimo Osti Studio is being introduced as a direct-to-consumer brand that will release monthly product drops, each one centered on a single fabric or product innovation. Some of them will be entirely new fabrics, others will be existing ones treated in new ways and some will be collaborations with other companies.
The first drop is centered on the use of Alcantara, an automotive-intended material already used in the past for apparel but here manipulated in a different way, according to Osti. Following drops are named 3D Trama; Collaboration on functionality; Tecnomesh; Graphic Exploration; Sailing Exploration; Gore-Tex, and Fresco Wool Gum.
The Paris Fashion Week event will display the first four, including one with toolmaker Leatherman.
Each drop will include four to five different garments — outerwear, pants and mid-layers, such as overshirts — available exclusively on the brand’s e-commerce platform.
“We decided to embrace a risk. It won’t be easy to measure up to [market] expectations. My sister and I are not designers, so we are launching the brand rebuilding the concept of a studio, a group of talents. The best way to pay homage to my father’s legacy is by carrying on his spirit, trying to do something that does not exist,” Osti said.
More than five decades since the ’70s, Massimo Osti has been at the forefront of innovation, pioneering the garment-dyeing, screen printing and decoupage techniques and helping to define the notion of Italian sportswear — filled with military and utilitarian references — as it’s known today.
In 1982 he masterminded the Stone Island brand, now under the Moncler umbrella, invented the brushed wool and rubber flax techniques in 1987 and introduced the signature C.P. Company “goggle jacket” in 1988, which attracted international youth subcultures, just to name a few highlights of his career.
According to his son Lorenzo, C.P. Company was no longer the right platform to carry on that legacy.
“We boast a high-profile R&D lab…which has several innovations in its pipeline that won’t find space in C.P. Company for pricing reasons, as a wholesale-driven business…so we decided to create a playground where we can take the most absurd things that have been developed [to market],” he explained.
Although he didn’t discuss pricing, he said that it will reflect manufacturing and sourcing costs for the innovative materials it employs, positioning it above the higher end of the C.P. Company price range.
Launching a new stand-alone brand rather than expanding C.P. Company’s scope seems also in sync with Massimo Osti’s business vision, one that led him to take more than a dozen brands to market throughout his career.
“This project is conceived as a full-fledged experimentation platform, on products, but also marketing and distribution strategies. We’re kicking it off direct-to-consumer as we think it needs a storytelling around it, which would hardly fit the [wholesale] model. At the same time, we believe garments deserve to be touched, that’s why we’re studying physical activations. We haven’t come up with a formula yet, but we’re engaged in conversations with partners,” Osti offered.
Massimo Osti Studio is under the umbrella of the Hong Kong-based Tristate Holdings Ltd., the owner of C.P. Company, which it acquired in 2015 following a number of ownership changes for the latter outerwear brand.
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