The A-Z Guide to Stone Island

A timeline of culture, silhouette, and materials of a nonpareil brand.

The bridge between sport, military tailoring, and fashion runs through a small town near Bologna. It was mapped out by a Pirelli tire salesman who invented garment dyeing and stood as a member of the Communist party; it has a black badge on its sleeve. Stone Island defies definition while inviting it: the 42-year-old house, founded by Massimo Osti, is framed as half history lesson and half an expanding set of experiments with dyes and fabrics.

Begun in 1982 as a single-digit run of canvas jackets made from old military tarp, Stone Island sold briskly as a new jumping-off point from vintage: silhouettes, taken from Osti’s expansive militaria archive, reimagined and reupholstered into work that’s quite different. Early collections evolved but never deferred to their sources: Coats were radically stonewashed; canon jackets and sweaters were Frankensteined. More than that, the range of styles Osti produced under Stone Island was massive, with half the work veering to tensile or cutting-edge fabrics— fasteners and masks added on for good measure—and half either delicate or Mediterranean, and minimal.Stone Island didn’t bridge these opposing aesthetics, but instead presented them plainly and left customers to fill in the gap. Chalk the freedom up to Osti—a generational talent, very broad in his interests and skills. Eventually, and then dependably, subcultures would dress themselves around the brand—in rough order: Milanese dandies, English soccer diehards, Mancunian artists, then grime rappers, then Americans. They saw in Stone Island not just a bridge between old and new but an amorphous place in which fashion history, militaria, and tech all melded together.Here, we look at some of the key elements and moments that defined Stone Island as perhaps the most forward-looking brand in clothing.

Al Panino sandwich shopBadge

The first generation of diehard Stone Island fans were domestic to Italy. In the early 1980s, the Paninari, a crew of well-dressed young Italian men and women which took stylistic cues from America (Timberlands, Levi’s) latched onto Osti’s early experimentations. The group was so named because they’d hang out at Al Panino, a sandwich shop in the Piazza San Babila neighborhood of Milan.Stone Island’s badge is a calling card, sure, but also the link between the whole enterprise’s variety of design. The small cloth swatch, stable and black for 42 years, doesn’t do anything. It has no technical purpose. It instead shrinks the distance between the brand’s delicate and futuristic work. Jet black technical jackets? Parkas? Coral red pants? All take a badge; all are Stone Island.

Casual

How to explain Stone Island’s association with England? Through football casuals. A sort of pre-chav, post-suedehead movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, the subculture married preppy or designer clothing—Aquascutum, Burberry, Lacoste—with soccer fandom that occasionally veered into violence. The scraps were bloody enough, and Stone Island was so integral to the scene that badges were banned in certain British stadiums. Though as the sport lost its edge and fans moved onto other scenes, the association was dropped.

DecayEuro ’92

Stone Island remains a technical brand whose pieces do very specific things. But they also decay. A certain substrata of down jackets from the late 1990s peel with regular wear; the thermal signature on “Ice” items might hiccup after a year or a couple decades of use. Some sweaters maintain a permanent flakiness. The decay can be a byproduct of technology that’s so on the edge it’s unproven. Lamination, for example, makes jackets starchy, and so they crack at the elbows and shoulders. It’s not a bug, though, but a feature: like a fade on a pair of jeans, though more technical.More soccer: How did the casuals Stone Island? Through international football competition. Fans who traveled and followed the Three Lions’s qualification matches for Euro tourneys and the World Cup in the mid 1980s and ’90s discovered Stone Island on the continent, reportedly on the backs of paninaro supporting the Azzurri. Some casuals even allegedly stole pieces from Genius, a store in Sweden, after England was eliminated in the ’92 Euro tournament’s group stages.

FunctionMussola Gommata

“We are not a fashion company,” longtime Stone Island CEO Carlo Rivetti once said in an interview. “We are not sports, we are not casual,” he told Esquire. This is probably true; Stone Island is a clothing company without definition— in a way no one else is. Consider the Submariner rollneck sweater, a late ’80s piece. Though it superficially sits between a fisherman cable-knit and an old army jumper—two functional garments—it’s actually a great example of rule-breaking. Four fabrics—somehow mixing viscose, nylon, and angora—elastic at the waist; an off-color rollneck. A progressive series of choices that aren’t in dialogue with any single piece of clothing, whether in an archive or on a runway or on the street.How to explain the flattened, weather-worn short and long jackets peppering Stone Island’s archives? Lots of them use Mussola Gommata, a proprietary fabric that’s about the same age as the company. Achieved by laminating cotton muslin fabric with polyurethane film, it creates a vibe close to a nylon bomber jacket, but thinner, hardier, and with more chromatic variety. So—not at all like a bomber.

Paul Harvey

Rivetti plucked Paul Harvey, a truck driver with a Central Saint Martins degree, to design for SI in 1996 after Osti’s retirement. Before that, Harvey worked for Sabotage, a German brand whose experiments dovetailed with Osti’s. Harvey lasted at Stone Island until 2008—he was replaced by a team of designers after he left, led by Rivetti; Joshua Bullen, now at Givenchy, was top boy for some time. When he ran the show he brought restraint and detail to collections. Often, Harvey’s pieces had only one thing going on. Many belted, many pure military; the closest the work’s been to Paris or Milan. Harvey is now at the helm of C.P. Company, which Osti founded in 1971; his designs remain lean and direct.

“Ice”Jackets

With the right fabric, even the most traditional Stone Island silhouettes can be louder than anything. Few are louder than the “Ice” line, a set of heat-sensitive jackets, pants, and knits that change colors when touched or when the weather changes. The first jackets were introduced in 1987, and early archival pieces remain among the most collectible; new silhouettes get steadily introduced with the tech. Still, for both, the color change sometimes has a time limit.One unfounded argument might be that before Stone Island, men’s jackets were functional or formal, but never exactly high-fashion. Call it the Moncler-Burberry dynamic: What was available, before the ’80s, was to be worn outside only in the country, on the Alps, or between building to building. Osti and Harvey bridged the gap and created functional, nondenominational clothing by referencing militaria, which was designed for every context, and expanding, through materials, the things these jackets could do—and could look like. These were jackets made for a different sort of outdoors. Fashion has mostly been that way since.

KevlarLinenModenaNumerical ordering system

No one in any clothing industry—tactical, fashion—had been able to dye Kevlar properly until Harvey figured it out in 2000. Using a lamination and coating process, Stone Island released a series of parkas and deck jackets, quite light and hardy, made of the strong and sometimes bulletproof fabric. A couple decades later, Stone Island’s work remains on the edge. A recent rendition, released through Stoney’s prototype research series, which features collections not yet perfected for factory production, included a jacket limited to 100 pieces and constructed out of “stretch-broken” Kevlar. Think yarn, but stronger, though not quite tough enough to stop a bullet.Much of Stone Island’s work can be characterized by a counterpoint between light materials and heavy functionality: improbably thin jackets, often looking degraded, that nevertheless keep people resilient and warm. Rubberized linen items, seen across newer “Shadow Project” collections, are among the most jarring.There’s less written in English about Osti than there should be for a designer and thinker of his stature and output. But lots of small facts jump out, and together assemble a portrait of someone who was both different and somewhat of a homebody. Osti didn’t like leaving Ravarino, in Italy’s Modena province: He built Stone Island’s lab there, with its 60,000 dyes and countless fabrics. But it wasn’t only work: In the early 1990s, Osti was elected as a municipal city councilor in Bologna, campaigning on the Communist ticket. It’s hard to really explain where anyone’s ideas from. But Ravarino, isolated from other fashion centers, offers some insight into the distance in Osti’s work.There is indeed a way to get to the bottom of Stoney, and date pieces. It just takes some work. Every piece should have a set of numbers on its tag—usually a dozen digits, with a slash after the ninth. The first pair in the identifier refers to the year and the season—even Spring/Summer; odd Fall/Winter. The second refers to the brand: as in Stone Island, C.P., or an offshoot. A fourth denotes the item type, then the model: say, an “Ice” down jacket. Then a pair of threes, Trio 1 for the cloth, then the dye. It’s unwieldy, but for a certain set of collectors it can become second nature, like the back of a baseball card. The code is helpfully specific in determining authenticity.

Oasis“Shadow Project”

Stone Island was especially popular in Manchester, owing to its rave and soccer scenes; the badge ended up on enough musicians’ left arms to fill out a bookcase. Most notable: the Stone Roses’ Ian Brown, grime MC Kano, and Oasis’s Liam Gallagher, whose catholic tastes include more convention-flouting pieces.How did Stone Island fully enmesh itself in America? Through music, likely, and over time, but also through “Shadow Project,” the cooperation with Berlin-based technical outfitter ACRONYM® that began in 2008. ACRONYM®’s Errolson Hugh had worked under Harvey, and the resulting collaboration with Stone Island resulted in pared-down, rigid lines that were not as visually experimental as work from the flagship. Collections have leaned heavily on black and bring to mind jewel thieves more than sailors (even in other colors). Less than the rest of the archive, it’s an acknowledgment of a world outside Italy, and is the closest Stoney’s ever got to New York.

Pertex Quantum and Pure Metal

They say it’s fabric first for Stone Island, then silhouette, then season. Two flagrant examples: Pertex Quantum Y, a recent offshoot down jacket in which the yarns, shaped like Ys, interlock, giving the shell a shiny look and making things thin. There’s also the Pure Metal jacket, produced from a stainless steel film attached, through a vacuum, onto light polyester. Very experimental—Stone Island says airplanes use the same material to shield their computers from ultramagnetic radiation—with tags on early models advising users to wear them with leather-soled shoes, so as to avoid the worst in the case of a lightning strike. A black and white embroidered badge on the latter denotes it’s an advanced research garment; like other Stoney lines at the edges of tech, the pieces look both shopworn and unmistakable from the jump.

Raso Gommato jackets

There aren’t an infinite number of Stone Island fabrics and treatments, just an infinite number of combinations. Raso Gommato, a satin weave cotton “of military origin,” per an old SI website, with a polyurethane cover, cuts through the variety like a knife. A key cloth in the archive—possibly the most widely used—Rasos comprise the treated canvas tent–looking puffers and shells, sometimes treated with metal, or rubber, that are out there all over the real world.

“Serie 100”

Launched in 2001 under Harvey as Stone Island women’s line, “Serie 100” left a few seasons’ worth of body-hugging shapes freckling the brand’s otherwise boxy archive. Jackets—some shaped like blousons, others like Crombies—did not feature tags and used mesh, two firsts for the brand. The short-lived line contained some of the purest distillations of Harvey’s pared-down, thoughtful design ethos; the best of which bring to mind a certain era of bygone Prada or Jil Sander.

Tela Stella

An improbable but very key beginning: After finding, in 1982, a canvas swatch used on truck tarpaulins, Osti produced seven jackets from the material, launching a separate brand that could grow uncontrolled away from his main thing at C.P. Company. The material, dubbed Tela Stella, has been kept in production, off and on, since. It’s Stone Island’s most direct expression of its overwhelming military influence.

“Toffee Wrapper”Urban Puffer

Just because a garment is functional doesn’t mean it’s functional. Consider “Toffee Wrapper,” an outerwear series of unmistakably shiny, permanently wet-looking jackets introduced in 1987, and which remains in sporadic production. Treated from glazed light silk—more or less—they’re the most immediately arresting items in the Stone Island archive. Improbably, no one else has harnessed the technology for regular use.The story goes that Osti—with his brand, Chester Perry (later renamed to C.P. Company)—was the first person to bring puffer jackets from ski slopes into the city in the early 1970s. History varies as to whether Eddie Bauer or Klaus Obermeyer came up with the silhouette, but much of the design influence on Stone Island’s puffers can be traced back to Moncler’s early down jackets from the 1950s. It’s a formal partnership now; the Milanese brand bought a stake in Stone Island in 2020 and took full ownership the following year. The purchase, Moncler’s first, has set the foundation for a multibrand group, and for more growth. “[Stone Island] reminds me a lot of what Moncler was ten years ago,” Moncler CEO Remo Ruffini said at the time of the sale. Since the purchase, Stoney has expanded its retail operation—stores in Stockholm, Chengdu, Chicago, and elsewhere—and its ads, has held a runway show, and has staged a massive archival exhibit in LA.

VelvetWest BerlinX Marks the Spot: Ground ZeroYachtingZeltbahn cape

Not all Stone Island is protective or functional—or even difficult. There are a small number of pieces made with velvet. A parka with a flocked velvet lining—known as Floccato—with a wrong-sided patch, from 1995, was then re-created again in 2005 with a “riot mask” design. As well, a selection of overshirts and a number of jumpers sit between the technical realm and the yacht one. They can fly under the resale radar.Though Stone Island’s collections are released on a traditional seasonal schedule, there’s only been one runway show in the brand’s history before its FW24 presentation in Milan in early 2024. Held in West Berlin in 1987, celebrating 750 years since the city’s birth and the 150-year anniversary of the garment industry, the show commingled both of Osti’s brands, featuring dancing and smoke and a soundtrack by Osti. You can buy his soundtrack for a fair price on vinyl resale sites.For a long time, the Century 21 closeout store across the street from Ground Zero in Manhattan felt like the only X on the map in America for those in search of Stone Island. Other stores had some stock, but the real treasure was a small rack somewhere near the closeout store’s sportswear, and after a while, upstairs by the long wall of suits, with an erratic selection of knits, tees, and jackets, often stocked out of season. Heavy parkas showed up in late winter or summer, raincoats and knits right in spring; never any “Ice,” now and then a Mille Miglia, and once—only once—a “Toffee Wrapper” popped up. This was at the tail of Harvey’s run. His items, though quiet, still stuck out against the store and the rest of the city’s stock at the time. I must have bought a dozen pieces there. Among this writer’s pickups: a pair of heavyweight, perfectly cut, unhemmed khaki pants, in clay cotton, with a badge near a rear pocket. Several parkas: a Raso Gommato in thick khaki, with a wealth of invisible pockets and drawstrings, a winter down coat with secret compartments and an imperceptible film. One C.P. Company sweater with goggles, a heavy, well-stitched toggle coat, serifed writing screened on the back. Though it had only hinted at retail in Manhattan, Stone Island was, even back then, far from a secret. On some days the rack would be bare; just as regularly, clothes would be chafed and messy and stripped of their badges. The solution was to swap yours with something else. (It likely explains faulty badge provenance for Harvey items on Grailed.) In 2016, Stone Island opened a flagship in New York, a few years before Century 21’s closing, but a few years after the rack unceremoniously disappeared.One benefit of the badge is the leeway it’s given Stoney to go deep down different aesthetic alleyways. The yacht-adjacent “Marina” line, launched in the ’80s, is definitively Stone Island and light-years away from its more esoteric research experiments. The best items—Bretonese striped shirts, flouncy knits, toggle coats, some coral—expand the footprint closer to the Mediterranean. Only Ralph Lauren stretches itself as wide.Half avant garde, half severely functional, the Zeltbahn cape, released in 1982, sits somewhere between a Claude Montana silhouette and the edges of esoteric army surplus. Designed after the German Zeltbahn M31 poncho—which turns into a tent—it trades in pure utility for aesthetics. It’s not a tent. It looks good. Knowing and technical, the reference has been eclipsed. One sees, in only one piece, where the entire obsession has come from.

GQ, ESPN Wall Street Journal. Sheer Drift