C.P. Company Is Turning an Archival Icon Into Its Future
Lorenzo Osti and Paul Harvey aren’t shy about what would have happened to pioneering, 51-year-old Italian brand C.P. Company without an intervention a decade ago. “We would not be here today,” explains Osti, the company’s president since 2019. “No,” says Harvey, who joined as head designer (alongside Alessandro Pungetti) in 2012. “Without that step, that rebranding, C.P. was dead.”
Founded in Bologna in 1971 by Lorenzo’s father Massimo Osti (also famously the founder of Stone Island), C.P. Company was one of the key players in creating the mashup of civilian casualwear and military-inspired functional clothing that we now know as Italian sportswear. Early on, it established itself as an industry leader in garment-dying techniques and textile innovation. And it was a subcultural smash-hit, perhaps most notably with the highly influential—and sometimes not-quite-legal—casuals in the U.K., who rocked Italian sportswear to cheer on and fight for their favorite football clubs. But by the time Harvey came along, a series of ownership changes and creative shakeups had left everything from the product itself to the marketing of the brand suffering.
“It was way, way off the rails,” says Harvey. A fashion-industry veteran who moved from London to Italy in 1979 and has logged time at influential brands like Sabotage, Ten C, and, yeah, Stone Island, Harvey knows of what he speaks. The heart of the problem, he says, was the complexity of the brand’s history. While its sister brand kept a relatively steady course over the years, “C.P. Company has been here and here, and then somebody did this and this, and it’s like, ‘What are you doing?’” People just weren’t sure what C.P. Company stood for.
To reestablish a sense of identity, Harvey looked to one of C.P. Company’s most recognizable designs—a jacket first created for the Mille Miglia car race across Italy. Dramatically different than pretty much anything else on the market thanks to the flip-down goggles incorporated into the hood, it’s an unmissable piece of apparel. “It was like, ‘Okay. This is one of the most iconic jackets in the world,’” Harvey says. “This lens,” he says, indicating towards the little black oculus, “this is C.P. Company.’” So he took that piece of plastic, shrunk it, and transported it. You can now find it on the sleeve of a jacket. The pocket of a pair of cargo pants. Even front and center on a bucket hat or a pouch.
“C.P. needed a symbol,” says Osti, who had a long career as a marketer before being appointed the president of the company. He points to all that history—the material innovation, the subcultural appreciation—and explains that it was simply too much for folks who weren’t already steeped in the lore of the brand. “But without this icon, all these things were impossible to tell because it was lost in too many…small rivers.”
He admits, though, that the lens took some getting used to. “Honestly, at the beginning I hated it. Coming from functional design, I said, ‘What the fuck? Why do we have a lens on the sleeves?’” He laughs, adding, “But as a symbol, it really worked.”
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Harvey has his own misgivings about the ubiquity of any branding element, even one that he helped popularize. He’s hopeful that now that C.P. Company is no longer in a “very difficult position,” the designs can start “moving away from that” idea of a single, recognizable piece of iconography.
“First we say, ‘Okay. This jacket or this sweatshirt or this trouser or this shirt, it has to be great.’ And then we put the badge on it,” he explains. “So, try and get away from the idea that, ‘I’m going to sell it because it’s got a trademark on it.’ Because that’s quite sad, I think.” Instead, he’s hoping to flip the formula back to where it should be.
“Once upon a time it was like that, right? Where what counted was the product. We’ve now moved to what counts is the story,” he says. “Which is fine. Things change, which is good. What we’re trying to do is to find the balance between the two. People should look at it and say, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. And it’s also C.P. Company, which is cool.’”
“We always say that the moment that you try to sell something to people, it doesn’t work,” Osti says. “You have to do good things by yourself. Then, if you do good things, maybe they pick you up.”
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