C.P. Company × Nikon

Announced September 28, 1988, on the Nikon stand at Photokina, the Obiettivo 18 was shown on a rail beside the new F4 rather than on a model. Massimo Osti had been photographing his own fabric tests on a Nikon F3 for years, and the project began when he wrote to Nikon's European office in Düsseldorf asking why no jacket had ever been cut around a camera rather than a person. Nikon passed the letter to Giorgetto Giugiaro, who had just finished the F4 body, and the three-way correspondence ran for fourteen months.

Osti built the shell from his garment-dyed nylon tela, dyed after sewing so the seams, tapes and padded pockets took colour unevenly and the jacket looked a year old on the first day. The front carries four closed-cell foam lens pockets, each sized to a specific Nikkor: the 35mm f/2, the 85mm f/1.8, the 105mm f/2.5 and the 180mm f/2.8 ED. Giugiaro's contribution was the single red stripe from the F4 grip, reproduced as a strip of red rubberised tape on the right cuff, where a right-handed photographer's thumb would find it.

The oddly specific part was the lining. Nikon engineers in Tokyo supplied a Kodak grey card and Osti's dye house in Ravarino spent six weeks matching a cotton poplin to 18% reflectance under daylight. Opened out, the left front panel works as a metering target, and a small printed scale inside the placket marks the correction for tungsten light. Nikon tested the samples with a spot meter before approving each dye lot.

Reception was split along predictable lines. The Italian fashion press called it too technical, and several Magnum photographers who were given early pairs complained the lens pockets pulled the jacket forward when fully loaded. Others wore theirs until the tela went soft and grey at the elbows, and it became a quiet signal at press pits through 1989 and 1990.