Stone Island Turned Its Fans Into Collaborators (EXCLUSIVE)

No matter how much you love a brand, it will likely never love you back. The world's truest clothing collectors typically indulge in their obsession from the outside-in, like lonely archeologists digging through ruins to excavate forgotten treasure. Stone Island fans, however, have it good.

At a pop-up housed within British retail giant Selfridges, Stone Island is showcasing choice finds sourced by international Stoney enjoyers — including both archivists like Arco Maher and Louis Holsgrove and retailers like 194 Local, Pezze, and Better Gift Shop — alongside its newest designs.

It's a great idea, contrasting Stone Island classics against new-school Stone Island ingenuity while also giving ample air time to some of the planet's most hardcore Stoney supporters. And the space itself is quite beautiful in an industrial sense, not unlike Stoney itself. The airy gravitas come courtesy of prolific designer Willo Perron.

As a result, you're made to feel like you're entering not a pop-up shop but an exhibit spotlighting an unsung but critical part of the Stone Island universe — especially for a brand so shaped by its own legacy of genius. This is more than clothing. It's Stone Island.

We spoke with Perron about devising a pop-up that straddles the past and present, living in the now while giving equal weight to what came before.

The coolest thing about the space is how it pedestals the collectors’ items alongside the new-season Stone Island pieces. How did you plan this build to accommodate that?

Across the six-week installation, a different group of collectors and archive pieces are introduced each week, so the space continually changes to highlight them in different ways. From the beginning, the design was about creating something completely modular and easy to rearrange, allowing us to bring a new perspective to the space with each rotation.

How modular are we talking?

We retrofitted an existing system, updated it and introduced some custom pieces. It’s really a kit of parts, mixing existing components with elements we designed specifically for the space. The result is a hybrid system that can be rearranged and adapted as the installation changes.

What was going through your head while developing this build?

I definitely think the highlight is the archive and the story of a brand that has been experimenting with materials and developing new processes since the early ’80s. That history is really the temple here. Of course, everything in the space is given a lot of attention, but we’re really highlighting the collector culture, the archive pieces, and the history of the brand.

And how did you aim to achieve this while also working within the framework of a busy department store?

There are existing conditions and guidelines within Selfridges that we had to build into, but instead of establishing one fixed retail flow, we designed it to change from week to week. New product comes in, archive pieces are presented differently, and each new group of collectors brings a different perspective to the space. The idea is that the store continually reinvents itself over the course of the installation.

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