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.
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