MR PORTER talks to Mr Leonardo Fasolo about how Mr Massimo Osti has influenced his brand Nemen – available on site today.

Mr Leonardo Fasolo, the man behind Milan-based brand Nemen, is a big fan of designer Mr Massimo Osti. Big. When MR PORTER meets him at the Jacket Required trade show at London’s Old Truman Brewery, he suggests we spend part of the interview at an exhibition next door, in which various garments from the Massimo Osti archive – created by Mr Osti for CP Company and Stone Island between the 1970s and 1990s – are on display. Mr Fasolo is clearly very much at home around these incredibly detailed, experimental pieces – each of which he rhapsodises about, at length – and they clearly inform what he currently does at Nemen: that is, make lovingly crafted technical outerwear, with many of the same details (include cap-like stiffened hoods; 3D, military-inspired pockets; cutting-edge fabrics; intricate dyes) that were so beloved by the late Mr Osti himself. Mr Fasolo is not at all shy of drawing the comparison – having worked at CP Company and Stone Island, as well as at Massimo Osti Studio in his early career, he is steeped in the history of Mr Osti’s work, and proud of it.

“He invented a new era of sportswear,” says Mr Fasolo. “He changed the perspective of menswear. He introduced this new style, the parka, into the male wardrobe.” It’s this mission that Mr Fasolo, at Nemen, is keen to continue. “We’re trying to keep the original form as much as possible, because it was already perfect,” he says. “We want to introduce it to the next generation with a new language, a bit more fresh, less nostalgic.”

Here’s where, if you’re not familiar with the work of Mr Osti, a summary would be most helpful, and would run as follows. Born in Bologna in 1944, Mr Osti was one of the late 20th century’s most pioneering menswear designers. As well as launching the era-defining brands CP Company (in 1975) and Stone Island (in 1982), Mr Osti dedicated himself throughout his career to innovation within the field of fashion production, inventing ingenious new fabrics (such as the thermo-sensitive material used for Stone Island’s Ice jacket in 1991) and manufacturing processes, most notably, the idea of garment dyeing. This technique, in which a finished piece of clothing is immersed in a vat of dye post-assembly, resulting in a rich, uneven colour that shifts across the surface of each piece, is now widely used (you can see it in products from brands as diverse as Massimo Alba and Visvim).

In his work for Nemen, Mr Fasolo takes such ideas as a starting point, and develops them to new levels of complexity, opting for the highest-quality cottons and nylons and meticulously researching new methods of dyeing and treating them. “If you come into the studio you’ll see we have a wall full of colour absorbency tests. It’s a problem sometimes – all the money we get from sales goes back into R&D. We’re reinvesting everything into the product.” The results of this approach are visible in the spectacular colours, as well as the tie-dyed and ombre patterns, of his jackets. Such finishes are achieved by a laborious process, as he explains when showing us one of the dip-dyed jackets that launches today on MR PORTER. “This season, this piece is garment dyed, dip-dyed, then pigment over-dyed. Then there’s a water-repellent treatment on top. So it’s four treatments for a single piece.”

The whole process, says Mr Fasolo, can take several weeks, and is only possible because, since its launch in 2012, Nemen has always operated on a small scale. The first collection, launched as a one-off limited edition, featured three styles, 100 pieces of each. There’s a wider range now, but the manufacturing quantities are similar. But, he says, proudly, it’s also a kind of artisanal production that could only happen in Italy, home not only to the world’s best garment dyeing facilities, but a heritage of artisanal skill when it comes to the creation of clothing. This is what Mr Fasolo means, in his company bio, when he relates his work to “tailoring”.

“It’s not tailoring in terms of sartorial tailoring,” he says. “It’s tailoring because we make outerwear in the same way that a tailor makes a suit. Sometimes we don’t even make sketches, we’ll work side by side with the pattern, pinning and changing the pocket structure. It’s something that is made artisanally, and it starts from nothing, so really, it is like tailoring in that sense.”

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