Ten C

Ten C was founded in 2010 in Italy by Alessandro Pungetti and Paul Harvey, two former Stone Island designers (Pungetti was Stone Island's design director, Harvey held a senior design role at C.P. Company) who launched the brand specifically focused on what they described as 'a technical-outerwear vocabulary anchored to the heaviest-weight Italian-mill nylon construction craft.' The brand was conceived as a deliberate doubling-down on the most extreme technical-fabric proposition that Stone Island and C.P. Company had been exploring through the 1990s-2000s. The Ten C vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: extraordinarily heavyweight (300-400 gsm) Italian-mill nylon outerwear with garment-dyeing in saturated colour combinations, the brand's iconic NY-KOS and OJJ-KOS technical-fabric variants (proprietary nylon blends developed exclusively for Ten C), deliberate-military-utility silhouettes including the iconic Anorak, the Sleeveless Anorak, and the Helmet-Hood Parka, and a colour palette anchored to military-olive, deep navy, oxblood, washed-charcoal, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, mustard-yellow, and the iconic Ten C 'dirty cream' tones. The brand is independent and held by Pungetti and Harvey through a small Italian production cooperative. Ten C operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, END., Dover Street Market, Antonioli, the major European luxury menswear specialty retailers, Beams Plus, and a wide Japanese department-store distribution. The brand has been one of the defining post-2010 Italian-anchored 'heavyweight-technical-outerwear' brands, with the deliberately-extreme nylon construction positioning specifically anchoring the brand inside the broader Stone-Island-and-C.P.-Company technical-outerwear conversation that has been continuously rewritten since 2010.