How Supreme, NikeLab collaborations made a streetwear darling of Stone Island, soccer hooligans’ favourite
- Rapper Drake is among the style icons and taste makers with a liking for Stone Island since the once-niche Italian brand’s collaborations with upstart US labels
- With new stores in Asia, Stone Island is expanding at fastest pace in its history, but creative director Carlo Rivetti insists ‘we are still a small company’
Stone Island is having a moment. The Italian fashion label with the very English name and following was founded in 1982, but it is only in the past five years that the brand has broken out of niche fandom and into the mainstream. Once unfairly associated with soccer hooligans, the brand has become a streetwear darling, winning over style icons such as the rapper Drake, who regularly posts pictures of his sizeable personal collection, including a US$100,000 gold and diamond Stone Island chain, to his 56 million Instagram followers.
In April Stone Island, in collaboration with Hong Kong fashion and investment conglomerate I.T, opened its first stand-alone Hong Kong store, in a fashion-forward cluster on Ice House Street in the city’s Central business district.
It’s been a long time coming, admits the company’s president and creative director, Carlo Rivetti, but he says it was better to arrive with the company in a “strong place”. And Stone Island’s strength is evident in the company’s recent moves. These include opening a flagship store in Tokyo’s hip Aoyama district last year and a very well-received store in Los Angeles’ North La Brea Avenue the year before.
In 2017, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, Temasek, acquired 30 per cent of the company for an undisclosed sum, following a similar investment in Italian fashion retailer Moncler. Stone Island is today expanding faster than at any point in its 37-year existence.
“Everything started from the US,” says Rivetti, 63, of the recent explosion in interest in Stone Island. “We were totally unknown there and then, almost, overnight it changed.”
