In 2026, the brand C.P. Company celebrates thirty years in South Korea with 996-026. Memories of Italian Sportswear in South Korea, an exhibition that retraces the brand’s journey in the country through archive pieces, photographs and testimonies from the local creative scene. It is an opportunity to tell how, since the first flagship store opened in Seoul in 1996, the dialogue between Italian sportswear and South Korean culture has built a shared story.

Hosted in the brand’s flagship store in Seoul, the exhibition does not limit itself to reconstructing the brand’s evolution through its archive pieces. At its center are also the people who, over the years, have helped make it part of the local creative scene.

The story begins before the opening of the first South Korean store. In 1993, Choi Jin Won, founder of GF Fashion, came across C.P. Company in the New York flagship store and was struck by its research into materials, the effects of garment dyeing and the attention paid to every detail. Three years later he opened the brand’s first flagship store in South Korea, starting a collaboration that continues to this day through their respective families.

The exhibition unfolds across two levels. The first retraces the origins of the brand, founded by Massimo Osti in 1971 under the name Chester Perry and renamed C.P. Company in 1978. Alongside pieces from the archive, the designer’s studio is reconstructed, offering a glimpse into the research method that helped define the brand’s identity. The second level instead looks at the period 1996-2026 through thirty portraits of figures from the South Korean creative scene, coming from different worlds, including cinema, music, art and fashion.

Each protagonist is photographed with an archive piece or with an item from their own personal wardrobe, chosen for the meaning it carries. Clothes thus become the starting point for telling individual experiences, memories and bonds built over time. The exhibition is accompanied by an editorial publication that collects these portraits and the participants’ stories.

The installation, too, reflects C.P. Company’s approach to design culture. On the façade of the flagship store, a selection of Goggle Jackets dyed in different colors creates a visual gradient that highlights one of the brand’s most representative techniques. Inside, the garments are displayed in transparent cases, echoing a method introduced by Massimo Osti in the Eighties to showcase materials, constructions and production processes.

With 996-026. Memories of Italian Sportswear in South Korea, C.P. Company thus looks at its own history without separating it from the people who have lived through it. The thirty-year milestone becomes not merely an occasion to celebrate a commercial journey, but a way to observe how a language born in Italy has found new interpretations in a different cultural context. Because a brand’s identity is built not only through what it produces, but also through the stories its garments end up holding.