Massimo Osti

Massimo Osti (1944 – 2005) was an Italian garment engineer and fashion designer most famous as the founder of the apparel brands Stone Island and C.P. Company. Osti's products were a mix of his own innovations and design ideas he got from studying military clothing, work-, and sportswear.

Massimo Osti was born and raised in Bologna, Italy. He became a graphic designer and worked in the advertising business. His career in the fashion industry began in the early 1970s, when he designed a T-shirt collection featuring placed prints. He was the first to use new techniques like the four-color process and silkscreen which are used for producing T-shirt. Following the success of this first T-shirt collection, he accepted the offer to design a complete Men's collection and became an equity partner in the company he would name 'Chester Perry' (later renamed the 'C.P. Company').

During this period, Osti laid the foundations for a creative philosophy entirely based on experimentation. The first innovation he would be responsible for in the clothing industry was garment dyeing, a process that completely revolutionized the field. It was based upon the concept of different materials in finished garments reacting differently to the same dye bath. Osti discovered that garment dyeing creates interesting tone-on-tone effects. This particular dyeing technique became typical for Osti's C.P. Company. In 1981, he launched "Boneville", a new brand alongside the existing CP Company and CP Company Baby collections.

Ongoing research on finishing techniques and materials led to yet another clothing line in 1982: Stone Island. The first collection was made entirely from a revolutionary new fabric that inspired from the tarps used by truck drivers. The 'used' look of this highly resistant, two-tone, reversible fabric was obtained through stone washing. This new collection was so successful that it sold out at every location within 10 days.

In 1984, Osti relinquished his shares of CP Company to GFT, but stayed on as president. He and his team devoted themselves to product development and communication strategies for the company. In 1985, he became the editor of CP Magazine, an extra-large format catalog/magazine that was sold at newspaper stands. It featured photographs of every garment in the CP Company collections and visualized the C.P. lifestyle perfectly. A circulation of 40,000 copies per collection proved that this unusual advertising tool was indeed effective. It started a trend that would later be followed by many other companies in the industry.

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