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The Massimo Osti story — what happened to the man who invented both brands
Words by Heather June Coombs
Stone Island was not born out of a marketing meeting or a seasonal brief. It was an engineering solution to a roll of truck tarpaulin.
Massimo Osti never called himself a fashion designer. He called himself an industrial technician or a graphic designer. That distinction matters, because fashion designers care about silhouettes, seasons, and runway applause. Osti cared about how to make military tarpaulin soft enough to sit against human skin, how to print on jersey without cracking the ink, and why a pair of Japanese protective goggles belonged in the hood of a motoring jacket.
Every piece of Stone Island and C.P. Company currently circulating on the resale market traces back to Osti. Without him, modern technical outerwear simply does not exist. Yet outside of obsessives, vintage dealers, and Italian archivists, his name remains oddly detached from the multi-billion-pound empire built on his ideas.
From printing presses to garment dyeing
Osti was born in Bologna in 1944. He started out in advertising, working as a graphic designer. In the early 1970s, he designed a line of printed t-shirts using silkscreen and four-colour process techniques normally reserved for paper. The collection sold out immediately. The clothing company he partnered with offered him a full partnership, and in 1971, Chester Perry was born.
The name did not last. Lawsuits from Fred Perry and Chester Barrie forced a change in 1978. Osti truncated the moniker to C.P. Company. By then, his focus had already shifted from surface prints to the molecular structure of textiles.
In 1973, Osti pioneered industrial garment dyeing. Before this, clothes were cut and sewn from pre-dyed fabric. If a jacket used cotton canvas, nylon lining, and polyester thread, each component was dyed separately before assembly. Osti flipped the process. He built complete, uncoloured garments and dipped them into dye baths at extreme temperatures and pressures. Because different fibres absorb pigment at different rates, the finished pieces emerged with complex, tone-on-tone depths of colour that conventional mills could not replicate.
It was messy, expensive, and unpredictable. It was also the exact moment functional workwear crossed over into modern menswear.
The accident that became Stone Island
Stone Island was never meant to be a brand. In 1982, Osti was experimenting with a rigid, two-tone truck tarpaulin called Tela Stella. The material was indestructible, but it was far too stiff to wear as clothing.
Osti put the fabric through an aggressive cycle of stone washing with pumice stones. The treatment broke the resin coating down, giving the stiff canvas the faded, weathered handle of a vintage military jacket found in a surplus warehouse. It looked incredible, but it was completely incompatible with C.P. Company’s refined, urban styling.
Rather than scrap the experiment, Osti cut a capsule collection of seven jackets from the material. He needed a separate identity for them. Inspired by the nautical novels of Joseph Conrad, he chose the name Stone Island. For the badge, he took a military-style embroidered compass patch, securing it to the left sleeve with two anchor-embossed buttons. The entire run sold out to Italian retailers in days.
What began as an isolated textile study quickly grew into a cultural behemoth. Osti spent the next decade alternating between C.P. Company and Stone Island, treating both labels as research laboratories funded by retail sales.
Function over silhouette: The Goggle Jacket
Osti collected vintage clothing with the discipline of a museum curator. His personal archive eventually housed over 35,000 military, workwear, and civilian garments from around the globe. He did not copy them. He dismantled them to see why a particular seam was reinforced or how an inner pocket distributed weight.
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In 1988, C.P. Company sponsored the Mille Miglia, the vintage car race through the Italian countryside. Drivers in open-top cars needed protection from wind, dust, and rain. Osti looked to 1930s Swiss civil defense hoods for inspiration and embedded thick acetate lenses into the fabric of the hood. He added another lens on the left wrist so the driver could check their watch without pulling back a sodden cuff.
The Goggle Jacket, known formally as the Mille Miglia, became an instant design landmark. It was absurdly functional. It was also deeply cinematic. Osti understood that men do not just buy clothes for warmth. They buy garments that make them feel equipped for an expedition, even if they are only walking to a football ground in northern England.
The departure and the neglected labels
By the late 1980s, the operational scale required to run both brands exceeded Osti’s patience for business administration. In 1983, he sold a 50 percent stake in his parent company, Sportswear Company (SPW), to the Italian textile giant GFT. The remaining shares were later taken over by Carlo Rivetti and his sister Cristina.
Rivetti was an astute businessman with a genuine appreciation for Osti’s genius, but Osti was an inventor who disliked corporate restraints. In 1994, Osti left Stone Island entirely. A year later, he severed ties with C.P. Company.
The work he produced immediately after leaving is among the finest of his career, yet it remains overlooked by the mainstream market. He launched Left Hand in 1993, using a non-woven, pressed-nylon material called Thermojoint that was waterproof, vapour-permeable, and resistant to nuclear radiation. He started Boneville, World Wide Web, and Massimo Osti Production, using woven stainless steel, carbon fibres, and rubber coatings.
These post-Stone Island brands lacked the mass-market distribution of SPW. They were expensive, difficult to produce, and often too radical for mid-1990s retail. Today, Left Hand and early Boneville pieces trade quietly among high-level collectors for sums that rival vintage Stone Island, but the broader public never caught up.
Whose shoulders you stand on
Osti died of cancer in 2005, aged 60. In the years following his death, Stone Island transformed from a European cult brand into a global streetwear titan. Moncler acquired the business in 2020 in a deal valuing the company at over a billion euros. C.P. Company underwent its own renaissance, finding a new, younger audience through savvy collaborations and technical reissues.
Most teenagers queuing outside flagship stores in London or Milan know the compass patch. Very few could name the man from Bologna who picked the thread for it. The corporate machine has done what corporate machines always do. It flattened the history into brand equity and logomarks.
This is why understanding Osti matters, particularly when buying pre-owned. When you hunt for an early Stone Island Raso Gommato, a Tela Stella trench, or an original C.P. Company Goggle Jacket, you are not just buying a badge to wear down the pub. You are holding the physical output of a designer who rejected runway vanity in favour of textile engineering. Osti proved that a jacket could be as considered as a piece of industrial furniture or a classic sports car. The badge is just the punctuation at the end of the sentence.
