Massimo Osti (1944 – 2005) was a famous stylist who founded two important brands: C.P. Company and Stone Island.

Massimo Osti was born in 1944 in Bologna. He had studied grafic design at Accademia delle arti in Bologna.

He became famous because he was the first designer who used on T-shirts the same printing method used for paper. After his first collection, he became busines partner with Trabaldo Togna (CEO of the biggest italian woolen mill ). They founded their first brand in 1971, its name was Chester Perry (a popular character of Linus’s comics), but afterwards it started being called C.P. Company.

Two years later (1973) Osti and his collaborators invented a process to color garments made of multiple fabric and fiber type.

Osti with C.P. Company was very succesfull: he founded a new brand in 1981 whose name was Boneville. The next year (1982) he found a new company, called Stone Island, after a canvas of truck. It was then called Tela Stella, which was the symbol on the seven types of jackets he designed later then. They were very resistant and also waterproof. The new jacket was inspired by the militar jacket, the badge, on the left shoulder, was inspired by the military badges; all the collection went sold out in 10 days. In the next years Stone Island became very famous: it was adopted by “paninari” (young people that wear designer clothes).

In 1983 the 50% of Stone Island was bought by Carlo Rivetti (the current CEO of Stone Island and C.P. Company and Professor of marketing at Politecnico in Milan ), Rivetti some months later bought the whole company Stone Island and C.P. Company and Massimo Osti continued to work in companies as a designer. In 1988 Osti and Rivetti created the ice jacket, that changed color based on temperature, they were the first desingers in using this method.

At the middle of 90’s Massimo Osti decided to leave the companies, Carlo Rivetti went to a fair in Munich where he met his future designer: his name is Paul Harvey. After twelve years Harvey left the companies. Later, Rivetti built up a new team made by designers who came from all over the world.

In this year Stone Island and C.P. Company are having many success in USA because a lot of rappers, like Tavis Scott, A$AP Nast and Drake frequently wear clothes of the brand. This brands are now very popular in america infact Travis Scott and A$AP Nast have done a dissing on Instagram because both think that they were the first to wear Stone Island.

There are some curious things about Stone Island and C.P. Company: Stone Island’s name was chosen by the wife of Massimo Osti, because in that period she had read Joseph Conrad’s novel that was set in a stone island; the windrose (the brand logo) was chosen because Massimo Osti loves the sea and because Stone Island had been doing a constant research to FOUND a perfect material for his collections; many hooligans wear Stone Island because they want to seem “good people”; another curiosity is that C.P. Company had the lenses because Massimo Osti, in 1988, done a jacket for all partecipants of Mille Miglia and after this event C.P Company would make all his creations with the same lenses.

Filippo Fini.