By Tony Sylvester.
Sitting in a club chair at the Permanent Style offices, I was curious how Simon might react to my pitch of a story on Stone Island. I had come prepared with ammunition, justifications for a piece that might sit just outside PS’s comfort zone, but one I felt emboldened in suggesting. A reader profile on the ever-stylish Myles Pereira in which he chose a rather natty red Stone Island fleece had also provided me with an ‘in’, as it were.
So I was both taken aback a little, and equally relieved, when Simon and Lucas gave it the thumbs up, saying that an article on their own appreciation for Stone Island’s new Marina collection was about to go live on the site. One look at the readers’ reactions confirmed my theory that it was indeed a little beyond the pale for the average Permanent Style reader. A predominance of commenters mentioned the terrace boy-sized elephant in the room, and there were a fair few “I could never wear Stone Island in polite society” confessionals to boot.
In many ways, I am not surprised. I too have viewed the brand sceptically, and certainly from an interested distance, over the years. And yet I can still remember the first time I was made aware of Massimo Osti’s creations, well over three decades ago now.
I was 17 years old when a fellow sixth former walked into the college common room wearing his new pride and joy – a Stone Island Ice Jacket. This miraculous garment resembled a US Airforce N3B ‘snorkel’ parka (or the English knockoff Lord Anthony version, so beloved by 80s school kids) but was in an iridescent sky blue (above).
As the wearer was eager to demonstrate to me however, this was only half the story. By standing next to the fan heaters and vigorously rubbing the garment, a sort of alchemy occurred and the coat transformed before my eyes into a camouflage colour.
I had never seen anything like it, and from further enquiry I gleaned that such a rare and unique beast came with a hefty price tag – northward of £400. An astronomical sum to a teenager in 1989, and might as well have been a million. And yet, how many other unveilings of previously unknown garments can I still recall 35 years later?
Over the years, I have owned a few pieces from the brand – a cream funnel-necked submariner here, a denim chore coat there – but my attraction to those pieces was almost by default. I would have worn the same things by any other brand: there was nothing that spoke to me about the make or detailing beyond a serviceable utility. It took a trade with a friend a few years ago to finally make the brand resonate with me.
The friend in question is more than likely known by PS readers: Ben Phillips was once the manager at the Drake’s Savile Row store, a well liked and sartorially regarded fellow with a penchant for interpreting that brand’s look to suit his own personal style. In the years since Drake’s he has helped establish a clothing line with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu ambassador Roger Gracie – BJJ is Ben’s other great passion alongside clobber – and his personal style has morphed with the change in lifestyle and direction.
A keen collector of vintage Stone Island pieces for some time, Ben was after a Coherence raincoat he had been badgering me about for a long time, in return for a recent pick up he wasn’t sure he loved all that much.
The coat up for trade was a Stone Island Montgomery duffle coat – a staple of the brand’s output from the mid 80s until the mid 90s. Unlike the British Army WWII issued ones, later adopted by Gloverall, the Stone Island fit was shorter and boxier and paid tribute to Italian military blankets, with a triple stripe woven into the wool around the hem and sleeves.
The colour was a supremely wearable moss green with black stripes, the toggles a lovely aged teak colour. Unlike so much Stone Island product I had seen over the years, it was positively ‘traditional’ in appearance with no apparent bells, whistles or obvious progressive innovation.
On closer inspection, there was one subtle modification – a series of hidden poppers on the inside of the placket, a neat addition that avoided the slippage of relying on toggles alone, something that often bothers me with duffle coats. Invisible to the observer, it was this simple, understated adjustment to a tried and tested formula that I realise sums up what I love about Massimo Osti’s creations the most.
Massimo Osti’s background was not in fashion, but in graphic design and advertising. Born in the historically left-leaning and progressive environs of Bologna, he was a salesman for Pirelli tyres in the 60s while studying advertising at night school.
The sloganeering and bold graphics of the 1968 Paris riots were particularly inspirational to a 23-year-old Osti, who opened his advertising agency CD2 the same year. His first client was the City of Bologna Tourist Board and Osti’s novel, for the time, campaign featured a series of screen printed T-shirts promoting the city’s charms.
This led directly to his first commercial brand CHOMP CHOMP where he pushed the limits of printing on cotton garments, blowing up photographs and overlaying multiple layers with oversized screens, or printing realistic details of zippers or pockets into shirts creating trompe l’oeil affectations.
The curiously named brand Chester Perry follows – a full clothing range still centred on printed clothing, with pop-art allusions adding experimental garment dyeing to the mix. The name came from the monolithic factory that cartoonist Frank Dickens’ character Bristow works at – daydreaming of a more exciting life beyond his desk-bound corporate anonymity.
But a growing international presence led to lawsuits from both Fred Perry and Chester Barrie in the mid 70s, and the name was truncated to the more utilitarian sounding and adaptable CP Company.
By the early 80s, CP Company was a menswear brand firmly established in both Italy and beyond. At its core, there was a curious tension between the traditions of masculine dress in form and silhouette, and the use of innovative fabric and dye developments. Osti built from an archive of thousands of pieces of military clothing and sportswear, while experimenting with colour in particular.
Of specific interest was the way over dyeing garments after manufacture, rather than at the cloth development stage, offers uneven and unique results, contributing greatly to how the garment ages and changes with wear. It is one such experiment that led to the creation of the Stone Island sub-brand.
In the early 70s, Osti had used a resin-coated furnishing cloth intended for sun awnings for jackets in his Chester Perry range. The cloth was two toned and its natural washed-out look reminded him of the salt-sprayed beach umbrellas of the Adriatic coast, where he holidayed as a youth. The customers did not share his enthusiasm however and many jackets were returned, the lack of colour-fast finish assumed to be an accidental defect.
Years later, one of the returned coats was fished out of the archive and sent to an Italian fabric manufacturer to copy and refine. Osti insisted on a natural unbleached cotton instead of a bleached cloth more suited to colour retention, and a heavy hard-washed canvas of dual-sided red and green was sampled.
He was so happy with the result that alongside the preparation for CP Company’s spring/summer 1983 collection, a smaller new line and identity was created and rushed to market from this pioneering fabric, now christened Tela Stella (from the latin ‘cloth of the stars’). This capsule collection delved back to Osti’s maritime nostalgia for both name and logo – a compass star accompanied with the Italian Isola Di Pietra: Stone Island.
CP Company had always courted an older professional gentleman as its customer; Stone Island was consciously pitched younger and less sartorially smart. The military and maritime inspiration was foregrounded, and for the first season this Tela Stella cloth was the sole fabric, dominating proceedings for the next couple of years in a limited range of colours. In contrast with the discreet image of CP, the more youthful intent was heralded by a conspicuous piece of branding: a black patch buttoned to the left arm of the garments.
As authors Tony Rivers and James Burnett point out in their excellent book Magnetic – an encyclopaedic overview of the brand’s early years, told from the point of view of the wearers and buyers – the first sightings of these new garms were often on the pop stars of the day, Simon LeBon and Nick Haywood being early adopters.
As the authors explain, until the early 90s it was rarely seen on the football terraces; it was the strict preserve of those in the know, either with the funds for the eye watering price tags or possibly a light-fingered adeptness for half inching the goods on trips to London or abroad.
The new terraces clientele was never the intended audience, and in fact in the UK stores learnt to separate CP and Stone island goods on the shop floor, for fear of unsettling the more aspirational CP client. In some British cities, the agents offered Stone Island to completely different retailers to CP, in order to preserve both lucrative markets. Perhaps, as PS readers have observed, the very visible branding could be viewed as much as a deterrent as an asset.
The blurring of the lines came at the end of the 80s, in the wake of the iconic Mille Miglia jacket from CP (above). Its unique hood with integral goggles skewed strongly to the tastes of the younger crowd, and proved a watershed in terms of customer integration and marketing.
But how did Osti himself view his prospective audience? In a rare interview in 1995 he states, when pressed on what audience he is aiming for: “People who know something about clothes, a person who can distinguish ‘things’ not just by looking at a label. That are able to recognise something different in a garment. I call these people ‘cultured’ with quotation marks or even ‘educated’ in a sense that they don’t buy a particular brand just because it is in fashion but because it does something for them: it stimulates them.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by English stylist Simon Foxton in System Magazine in 2019: “It feels and looks expensive – which it is – but not in a flashy here-today-gone-tomorrow way. It’s more like a well designed car or motorcycle.”
Osti gave up creative control of the company in 1993 to partner Carlo Rivetti, remaining on board for a couple of years strictly in a design capacity. The years from inception in 1982 to the petering out of Osti’s involvement mark the parameters of my main fascination with the brand. Rivetti brought a young English designer Paul Harvey on board to head up proceedings, and to my personal taste the more flamboyant outer aspects took a front seat, along with often slimmer fitted silhouettes, losing some of the appeal for me.
This more modern era has its disciples for sure; Moteen Abassi, another Drake’s alum (above), is a firm believer, as is Rag Parade’s JoJo Elgarice.
Moteen was another inspiration for my formative appreciation for the brand. From our time working together at Timothy Everest into his tenure at Drake’s, he would mix the more lavish Paul Harvey creations with the conservative tailoring of his day job, alongside contemporary pieces from Engineered Garments or Needles.
Earlier still, when I started working with the fellows at Duffer of St George and Present in the 2000s, the done thing was to remove the patch from the arm in a show of stealth nonchalance. The large puffer coats in the stock room also doubled as practical sleeping bags, for those staff too inebriated to make it home after nights out in the Cross Keys down the road; but that’s another story.
My advice for a personal way into the brand’s four decades’ legacy is to look at the jackets and coats first. It’s clear that this has always been the focus for innovation and also presents the easiest options for complimenting your existing wardrobe.
I would stick with the Tela Stella cloth and its descendants for their nautical sailcloth charms, while the later ‘Formula Steel’ cloth offers a robust nylon with a pleasing shimmer. The original Montgomery duffle that started my obsession remains a firm winter fave, swapping out for resinated cotton versions from the Marina collections in the summer months.
When hunting for old pieces, a green edge on the patch denotes a pre-2000 vintage, while a makers tag inside bearing the CP company logo instead of ‘Sportswear spa’ shows a garment was part of Osti’s time at the helm. My other love aside from the outerwear is the boatneck tees and sweatshirts from this same era – pleasantly unique in appearance, often in mid-weight French terry-backed cotton, I can find little comparison in the current market.
Like all the best things in life, not everything is for everyone, and if that damned patch is too much of an overstatement to get over, simply do as the Duffer lads did and remove it completely
