The right of withdrawal shall be exercised by sending, within the aforementioned term, a written notice to the geographical address of the supplier's registered office by means of a registered letter with acknowledgement of receipt. That very Italian way of looking forward not only feels urgent and useful today, but also like a way for fashion to escape the quicksand of dry, soulless marketing, the fundamental dishonesty of relentless product-making that is the devilish cover up for a widespread lack of ideas in this saddening historic moment. Osti did not really care, however; he liked playing his own game too much, took too much pleasure in skewering the auteur rhetoric that was integral to the meteoric rise of the ‘Made in Italy’ movement. Massimo Osti was a man of ideas, full of concepts that mattered, not layers of varnish over nothing – and he worked hard, if playfully, to make them happen.

The goggles on the hood felt almost like Blade Runner; it was all performance-art Mutoid Waste Company, yet the jacket’s tobacco-brown fabric’s lived-in patina made it look easy to wear. We are talking about the time of Nintendo, Walkman, Back to the Future, RoboCop, Ghostbusters, Air Max 1’s… colour changing clothes was incredible! The section uses not only newly photographed garments from the archive but also fabric swatches, notes for the prototyping department and dye-tests to explain the story of the invention of Sportswear in unprecedented detail.

In our ever-connected globalized world, national identities might appear irrelevant to fashion, but a local spirit is an essential ally in the war on the generic. As Berardi points out, “the production of Massimo Osti matured in this linguistic climate which produced objects to underline a function and at the same time negate it, dissolve it, and mock, in a certain sense, the function itself.

The most important of these characters is Massimo Osti, because he was the one that founded the brand in 1982. An avid collector of vintage militaria, he built an extensive archive that functioned as the primary source material for everything he did. During a maritime storm, Daniela Facchinato – Osti’s wife – passed around prototype jackets made from an extremely lightweight, opaque, wrinkled nylon, to shield their guests from the rain. It also allows unused or leftover light shades to be re-dyed and treated for later seasons, reducing the amount of waste created. Osti collected over 35,000 historical pieces throughout his career, which he kept in a large warehouse and bestowed incredible value on them when envisioning new collections.This second section closely examines each of Massimo's most important inventions in the world of fabrics, from the epochal industry-shifting intuition of garment dyeing to lesser known early Stone Island fabrics such as JJ23 to the legendary Raso Gommato, Ice Jacket and Reflective, to later high-tech subtleties such as Tecnowool. The book tells its story through images of Osti’s most important designs: his innovations in garment dyeing, his development of new fabrics inspired by the tarps truck drivers use to batten down loads, and other materials such as rubber flax, the “Ice Jacket” that changes colors with the temperature, or “Technowool,” a wool and nylon wear-resistant “urban armor. Used by various armies through the 19th century, the simple but versatile canvas can be used in numerous ways.

His genius was then to take those ideas and remould them into something totally new and modern in look and feel. To dream of adventurous pastimes, of holidays on a yacht or on the ski slopes in a jacket that changed color.Many of Osti’s outerwear designs have a 2 in 1 nature; an inner detachable layer, made to keep the wearer warm and an outer shell, normally with some form of new treatment or process to make it stand out from previous designs. Foreword by Stefano Bonaga, Francois Girbaud, Ashley Heath, Pier Luigi Piana, Bruna Rossi, Gabriele Salvatores, Paul Smith, Franca Sozzani, Alberto Tomba, Paolo Zegna. P. Company to the boom of Stone Island to the later experiments of ICD and Double Use, illustrating the progress with images of original catalogues, extant magazine editorials, advertising, and archival material such as merchandise, sketches and brand labels. Each piece is unique and unrepeatable and the differences between one garment and the other are a peculiar feature of the product itself” – Taken from a CP Company tag.