Massimo Osti Studio

The Massimo Osti Studio is a reflexive space, where the input of multiple individuals at various levels is integrated into the industrial design process. This collaborative approach can be traced back to the 15th Century and the studios of the Italian Renaissance, where the ‘hand of the master’, was transferred from one generation to the next. Indeed, there are many hands in the studio that reach back through time to Osti, as well as newer hands that reach forward into the future. Each brings their individual skills to bear on the work of the studio and its outputs.

Through his multiple innovative methodologies, Massimo Osti reimagined the industrialised processes developed in 20th-century Italy for the mass production and construction of clothing, integrating the technological machine with the human hand.

Osti’s working processes purposely questioned the notion of authorship. Existing mass-produced military, utilitarian, or vintage garments were duplicated full-scale on industrial photocopiers replicating their original design details, but also retaining the histories of previous makers and owners, ingrained within their worn surfaces.

Osti's intervention, through a process of printing and collaging these images together, resulted in the assemblage of these images into new garments. This replication of pre-existing garments and their multiple histories called into question the temporal nature of the fashion system itself. Using multiple industrialised processes, such as whole garment dyeing (Tinto in capo), saw the production of clothing that appeared already worn, representing a radical antilinear approach to the fashion system's veneration of newness.

Osti disrupted the idea of the designer as maker instead his role, echoed that of Duchamp or Warhol, repurposing the readymade through a series of industrial interventions by skilled artisans and technicians to create something new that resonated within our cultural collective memories. We frequently elevate and worship the idea of the artist’s hand as having an intrinsic value, yet it was Osti’s understanding of the abilities to use technology in the industrialisation of previously artisan techniques such as whole garment dyeing that enabled the hybridity of the industrialised hand.

Jimmy Jumble: Remembering Andrew Groves’ Anarchic London Label

Before becoming a fashion academic at Westminster University, Andrew Groves ran the cult label Jimmy Jumble in early 90s London, embracing kitsch, kink and banality. Here, he talks about why he “allowed it to be chaotic”

By Joe Bobowicz

Back in the day, Professor Andrew Groves was a darn sight wilder, infamous for his alter-ego-cum-label, Jimmy Jumble. Outfitting himself and clubgoers of the early 1990s, the outspoken creative used his tongue-in-cheek garb as an antidote to what he saw as a scourge of puritanical design, placing kitsch and kink on a pedestal. Now an established academic working at Westminster University, Groves is a cited author and peer-reviewed researcher, but his prankster past remains a treasure trove for students and fashion collectors alike. Today, he answers our video call calm and collected, ready to discuss the fake-nipple dresses and ‘Fashion Police’ jackets that sparked his career.

“So precocious for a 22-year-old,” he says, having just read an interview he gave in an early issue of Dazed. In it, he slates popular designers of the time, proffering instead his irreverent blend of Hysteric Glamour meets Fiorucci and Jean Paul Gaultier. Credit to Groves, though: his work was strong enough to warrant co-signs from Kylie Minogue, Naomi Campbell, Kirsten Owen and the fiercest drag queens holding court in 90s London. In fact, this all came before he worked as head assistant to his former boyfriend Alexander McQueen. Only then would he complete his MA in fashion design under the late Louise Wilson’s watchful eyes, moonlighting as a designer for fetish brand Regulation. After graduating, he opened his eponymous label. Clearly, he was on to something.

Both a brand and persona, Jimmy Jumble began the year after Acid House’s Summer of Love. So the story goes, it was Groves’ birthday and he hadn’t received any presents. Preparing for the night ahead with friends at YMC co-founder Fraser Moss’ flat, he rumbled through the housing block’s mail, happening upon a black and gold lurex jumper to wear that evening. Moss crowned him Jimmy Jumble, and it stuck ever since.

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The British history of Burberry

Ahead of Daniel Lee’s debut for the London-based house, we unpack how the brand has contributed to Britain as we know it today.

BY JOE BOBOWICZ

Up there with pubs, Sunday roasts and queuing, Burberry has been a staple of British culture from day dot. Along the way, it’s evolved from a rural upstart in sleepy Basingstoke to a global powerhouse, becoming a conduit for discourse around British identity and class structures, all while remaining one of the most universal luxury brands.

Of course, the other side to this story was taking place in the bowels of working-class life, where style-savvy casuals began appropriating the check to their own ends.

As Westminster University’s Professor Andrew Groves puts it, this was “the ultimate form of transgressive dress, enabling not only the subversion of the brand, but also the dominant culture that it purported to represent.” For Andrew, the resulting contradiction became part and parcel of the brand, central to its success this side of the millennium. “In essence, their core product is Britishness, and everything else is merely a manifestation of that,” he adds. After all, what could be more British than the class system?

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