Massimo Osti, "the Father of Sportswear and Techwear" — You Probably Didn't Know He Reshaped Modern Menswear Design

"Fashion is about which clothes people are willing to wear. Whether something is fashionable is a state of mind, something very personal. That should be the true meaning of fashion today."

In the early 1970s, Massimo Osti, then a graphic designer in advertising, took on a job designing a series of T-shirts, and printed his own custom patterns on them using silkscreen. For the clothing world of the time, this was something new.

The technical experiment paid off. The T-shirts sold out fast and earned Osti the title "King of the T-Shirt."

That launched a career of experiment in clothing that ran until his death in 2005. Besides his best-known sportswear labels, C.P. Company and Stone Island, Osti also founded the menswear brands Boneville, Left Hand, and Massimo Osti Production.

On April 8, Subversion and Reinvention: The Massimo Osti Menswear Exhibition opened at the China International Design Museum, the first show in the "Modern Menswear Design" exhibition series. On display were 52 pieces of menswear designed and collected by the Italian fashion designer Massimo Osti, all drawn from the more than 36,000 pieces of menswear that the Chinese-American fashion designer David Chu donated to the China Academy of Art.

It is a vast collection with a wide reach. It includes what Chu himself began gathering in the 1980s, and roughly 35,000 pieces he took over from Osti in 2003 — clothing Osti had collected over more than 40 years, plus menswear designed for C.P. Company and Stone Island, the labels he founded in 1975 and 1982.

When Massimo Osti entered the clothing business in the 1970s, the sharpest feature of Western fashion was its emphasis on personal expression, a legacy of the wave of liberal thought that swept the late 1960s and reshaped every corner of postwar Western culture: literature, film, music, feminism, racial equality, minority-rights movements.

In the early 1970s, Vogue declared that "in the game of fashion, there are no rules left at all." The hunger for clothes with visual impact also flooded the market with cheap, overproduced synthetic garments.

On one hand, that gave Osti's bold experiments room to grow. On the other, he was unhappy with a clothing market that chased trends and ignored function and comfort.

From the start, the styles and fabrics already on the market could not satisfy him. A single piece of menswear opens onto many fields still open to exploration — color, material, shape, decorative detail — and together they decide how far clothing design can go.

Osti saw this clearly. What he set out to do was find those possibilities through constant experiment.

The experiments rested on the menswear collection Osti began building in the 1960s. He collected vintage menswear from different eras, regions, and trades: military uniforms, postal workers' clothing, firefighting suits, diving suits. This was not just a private hobby; it was the foundation of his design work and his source of ideas. In designing clothes, Osti believed, the imagination and inventiveness of technicians count for more than the fantasies of fashion designers. These old garments were worth studying because every fabric and every detail in them had been chosen for function, and lost no beauty in the process.

The military uniforms he collected make the point best: the pockets, pleats, caps, inner layers, and belt loops were all beautifully worked out, and each had its own job — ahead of any other clothing design of the same period. That is no surprise. Military research commands large budgets, and can use the most advanced technology to test and improve every part of a uniform. Osti was fascinated by the technology behind such clothing, even though he was a fierce "anti-militarist." "So how do you bring these things into what civilians wear every day?" That was the question he kept turning over.

Once he had the old garments in hand, Osti would take them apart, study what lay behind their fabrics and details, and write them back into his own work.

Through the 1970s, the black-and-white photocopier became his tool for recording and sorting. Osti would copy anything of a workable size — buttons, pockets, collars, zippers, sleeves — and file it away by category, for reference when he needed a particular detail later. "Innovative ideas never come out of nowhere. Design that faces the future needs to look back at history and learn from it. Osti did that systematically," David Chu said.

Osti gathered a great many parkas and field jackets, whose varied details enriched his research into what clothing can do.

The parka began as an Inuit windbreaker; during the student movements of 1968 it was also reworked into a polished urban style. Its most striking feature is a hood that can be pulled tight at the neck, shielding the wearer from bitter cold and storms. Inspired by the parkas used by the U.S. Air Force, Osti created the "moldable hood": a metal wire set into the hood's edge so it would sit close against the face.

The field jacket was another of Osti's everyday favorites; its many pockets held several black notebooks, pencils, pens, pipe tobacco, and fabric swatches. Which shows, too, how a garment's function can cut down the rest of your gear — you can walk out the door with empty hands. After taking apart and studying field jackets from various countries, Osti drew many different designs out of them: sweater linings, removable inner layers, inner pockets, drawstring waists, so that one garment could meet several needs.

The Goggle Jacket was a piece C.P. Company made in 1988 as a sponsor of the Mille Miglia vintage car race, and it grew out of Osti's research into the protective masks used by Japan's civil defense forces. The design stretched a garment's function to cover the eyes and the face.

This strange, daring jacket spread quickly through 1980s Europe, and above all through Britain. Under Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, the country's divorce rate, unemployment rate, and poverty rate all hit record highs. The Goggle Jacket caught the eye of youth subcultures; it gave "football hooligans" and young people stripped of their prospects a way to voice their disappointment, and to push back against a system growing ever more elitist.

Osti's experiments also concentrated on new fabrics, because fabric decides a garment's comfort and its basic function. That set him apart from what we usually understand a fashion designer to be; what Osti did looks more like the work of a textile engineer. "Design driven by function" is how Yann Debelle de Montby, co-curator of Subversion and Reinvention, described Osti's practice. He worked constantly with the most basic materials — wool, cotton, nylon, silk, linen — and by testing different treatments, blended and refined them into fabrics that suited every kind of wear and style.

In 1982, a fabric called Tela Stella let Osti open a new production line: Stone Island, which would become the brand he is known for. This coarse, worn-looking cloth was immediately a wholly new idea in the textile trade. Tela Stella came out of the possibilities Osti saw in the tarpaulins on military trucks. The original tarpaulin was tough and windproof but far too stiff, so he softened it with heavy stone-washing until it was a fabric a body could wear.

For another Stone Island sportswear line, the Ice Jacket, Osti used Sway nylon, newly developed by Japan's Toray Industries — a nylon coated with a resin holding heat-sensitive microcapsules that react to changes in the surrounding temperature. An Ice Jacket made from it behaved like a chameleon. This brought a revolutionary material into clothing. Clothes were no longer objects standing alone; they could connect with the world around us.

To free every new garment from stiffness and constraint and make it feel more natural, Osti began testing "garment dyeing" as early as 1973. After the first trial, he found that two different fabrics dyed together in a single bath react differently to the dye. That is how the effect of "tonal color matching" came about. In the end the experiment meant that one finished garment made of cotton, wool, nylon, rubber, and leather could be dyed in a single bath. Each material took on a slight, distinct difference in shade while the garment kept an even, coherent look — which released clothing entirely from the stiffness and cutting constraints that piece-dyeing imposes.

"What Massimo Osti means for the history of modern menswear design is that he began to think about clothing in a new way. 'Subversion' refers to Massimo's method of hands-on experiment, which no fashion designer before him had used. 'Reinvention' takes us back to his use of vintage clothing. Every one of his designs can be traced to a source, but none is simple imitation — something new is always being made," Yann told QDaily. That is also why the Modern Menswear Design series chose to start with Osti.

In Italian fashion, Massimo Osti is acknowledged as "the father of sportswear and techwear." Through the 1980s, his studio put out five collections every two years: 600 garments a season, at least 1,500 original designs a year. In that same period, C.P. Company, Stone Island, and Boneville built up some 800 wholesale outlets worldwide.

The 1990s were Osti's most active years in fashion. In 1991, C.P. Company opened its first standalone store in the Flatiron Building, a New York landmark. On 20 years of accumulated experience in form and technical innovation, Osti went on to found Left Hand and Massimo Osti Production within the next three years. The men's fashion magazine Arena Homme+ called him "one of the most influential figures in menswear of the 1990s."

"And yet that influence still isn't fully understood outside Europe. That's why I wanted to bring him to the China International Design Museum," David Chu told QDaily.

In a 1999 interview with Arena Homme+, Osti described his own work this way: "I design clothes for men who travel the world and move through different environments. I hope that one day there can be a global collection, one that takes everything into account — price, climate, function — and suits anyone, anywhere, at any time. Selling beautiful, design-heavy clothes to rich people is not difficult. Getting the best performance out of a garment at the lowest price, that is the real challenge."

Because he thought this way, Osti deliberately kept his distance from "fashion trends." His thinking and his practice in menswear redefined what fashion is: it should not be merely a trend set off by celebrities. It is which clothes people are willing to wear, a state of mind. And clothing built on exact research into the right materials and forms is what respects that state of mind.

"Clothing is really a social science. What style of clothes you like to wear, what you choose to wear and where — that is a culture, just like literature, film, or music," David Chu said.

What Massimo Osti did was widen the borders of that culture, and then hand the choice back to us.

Images in this article, unless otherwise noted, come from the China International Design Museum and were taken by the reporter.

Cover image: drapersonline