Osti, the Photocopier, and the Question Machine

What kind of complexity should we afford ourselves?

Massimo Osti couldn’t draw garments. While he was trained as a graphic designer, his work before designing fashion was centered on visual communication — understanding composition, layouts, formats. He founded C.P. Company and created Stone Island anyway.

What he had instead of drawing skill was a collection: military and workwear garments, eventually tens of thousands of pieces. His son Lorenzo Osti explains why it existed: “If you don’t have the mental tool to imagine things from zero, you need references and examples. You need garments. And you need them at arm’s reach. So you start to collect.” He studied them for function. Why is a pocket where it is? What was a fishtail parka actually for?

When he designed, he laid garments on a photocopier. He cut a pocket out of one jacket, placed it on another, looked at what that did. Recombinations no trained fashion designer would have tried. Out of that came much of what we now call sportswear. The material knowledge came later, and it ran deep. The beginning is what holds my attention: an outsider entering the discipline by studying use.

Andrew Groves, who built the Westminster Menswear Archive, frames what made this different: fashion is usually about creating iconic moments of newness. “Massimo was about investigating what already existed and reinterpreting it, making it relevant for that moment in time.”

Errolson Hugh of ACRONYM has said Osti’s influence on him was never the products; it was the way Osti worked. The freedom to ask questions nobody in the field had asked. The freedom to recontextualize a garment while taking its origin seriously.

It would be disrespectful to call Osti a vibe coder for fashion in the 1970s. But there is an inkling of truth in it.

AI democratizes the answer while doing nothing for the question. It is an answering machine that doesn’t care about a user’s motivation. You can see where that leads in a lot of vibe-coded software. You can see it in workwear that copies the look of a chore coat with no idea what the chores were. A photocopying machine doesn’t care what you photocopy, but in the hands of the right person, it can become a transformational instrument.

In the hands of someone who has spent years accumulating questions, the same machine works differently. It makes recombination cheap — across disciplines, across things that used to be technically or economically out of reach. What remains not cheap is asking the right question and not getting lost in the opportunity of making the same thing faster, cheaper and less relevant in the process.