C.P. Company NEXT LANDSCAPE AW2020

NEXT LANDSCAPE refers to the overarching concept, developed by designer Paul Harvey, for the C.P. Company AW020 collection. It represents a hopeful image of a future urban environment, in which nature is given the space to grow back vitally and spontaneously amongst the essential architectural forms of the city.

Working directly from reference images of the abandoned and now overgrown city of Chernobyl C.P. Company has created a collection comprised of a series of structural elements that together represent the entire spectrum of this hypothetical next landscape: ranging from remastered ultralight and high- performance versions of the iconic Urban Protection Metropolis jacket (first issued 20 years ago, in 1999) in Dyneema and GoreTex Xenia and Infinium, to crystal jackets made from a dyed achronic flat profile nylon with visible structural accents [KAN-D] and a related series of down jackets [OUTLINE] to aged metallic patinas [ANTIC SILVER] and a colour palette of faded industrial pastels. As is always the case with C.P. Company, sophisticated fabric treatments – in particular the development of a series of taslanised monobava nylons [TAYLON] but above all complex garment dyeing processes have been used throughout to imbue the aforementioned architectural elements with the organic, worn-in textures and atmospheric presence of the Next Landscape.

Particular attention has been given to the Urban Protection Metropolis jacket, specifically its elaborate system of storage pockets (in itself a signature brand detail). The Metropolis pocket system is repeated, retuned, concentrated and expanded into new ergonomic formations [OVERLOADED] throughout the collection in a ghostly signature of what functional clothing might mean in the future.

About C.P. Company

In 1978 Massimo Osti, a young graphic designer from Bologna who would go on to be recognized as the “godfather of urban sportswear,” changed the name of his brand Chester Perry, founded in 1971 and famous for its screen-printed t-shirts, to C.P. Company. This drier, more mature name inaugurated one of the most explosive and influential bursts of creativity in the history of sportswear.

Over the last decades the brand has continued to pioneer a connoisseurial hybrid style that combines the functionality of vintage military, work and sportswear with intense fabric research and innovation, heightened by the use of garment dyeing, a technique which C.P. Company was the first brand in the world to pioneer in the mid-1970s. This hybridization of functional menswear and Italian fabric innovation is the origin of C.P. Company and still today remains the basis of every piece of clothing to carry the C.P. Company label.