A Lesson In Creating a Stone-Island-Tier Stone Island Store (EXCLUSIVE)
How do you make a store worthy of Stone Island? Surely, the project could potentially head in a million different directions, what with the Italian luxury label's decades of heritage, dozens of signature motifs, and impossibly vast archive of innovations. Is it better to go understated, to better pedestal the clothes, or should one opt for flash that mirrors Stone Island's tech?
Samir Bantal, director of the fluid AMO "think tank" that exists within Rem Koolhaas' OMA architectural agency, made the answer seem simple as he walked Highsnobiety through the redesigned Stone Island flagship store in New York.
Basically, the medium was always going to be the message.
"Initially, when Stone Island asked us to do the stories for them, the whole point was to translate their approach to clothing into architecture," he says. "It's like applying the same kind of logic that Stone Island has with fabric to the store's materials."
The lesson here is to avoid overthinking by zooming in on the client's core traits. Consider Stone Island's typically exhaustive approach to fabric development, one of the sport-luxe label's foundational touchstones. The Italian brand quite literally mad-scientists its color treatments in a laboratory before applying them to garments that're born totally white, like a blank canvas (sometimes, they even stay white).
OMA applied a similar approach to the bones of the Stone Island store, setting up foundational elements as the main event.
The Stone Island store's main material is a dense "cooked" cork, Bantal says, sandblasted to bring out a grain. Set in place, the raw material receives only a thin layer of paint. Likewise, near the fitting rooms, combed stucco and sand-and-resin-scored steel wear only a slight hue that emphasizes organic texture and, thus, the process behind it all.
Much like how Stone Island has developed quite literally thousands of color "recipes" to create its garments, OMA had to develop its own recipes to build these blocks. "The journey is to find the right material, test it with the supplier and then develop our own recipe that we share with the contracting team that develops it," Bantal says.
Akin to how inks bleed from finished Stone Island garments, the New York store's interior will shift over time to underline the human hand that shaped this tangible alchemy.
"The whole point of this is to have an additional way to communicate Stone Island's messaging," says Bantal, gesturing to screens that display campaign imagery but also the walls, the framework, the furnishings.
Even the garment displays, mirroring other Stone Island stores, group together color-blocked garments that reflect the brand's storytelling through pigment.
Not that everything in the new Stone Island store is so interpretive. Bantal also shouted out a few of the designers with whom OMA partnered on the finishing touches, including light designer Tim Hooijmans and seating designer Markus Tōll, to give Stone Island store a plainly cool sci-fi edge — "There are a lot of references," he says. "Star Wars is actually not a bad [call]." — mirrored by the in-house DJ equipment that includes Friendly Pressure speakers and a turntable with a bespoke Stone Island slipcover.
There is an in-house archival display that'll host a rotating selection of ultra-rare Stoney goods. First up: a supremely rare metal jacket from the turn of the century.
"It's about showing how long this kind of experimentation goes back, that some of the pieces you see today are inspired by things that were developed maybe 10 years ago or 20 years ago. They couldn't be done in a, let's say, efficient or commercial way, but now they can," says Bantal. "You continuously see the legacy of experimentation throughout the Stone Island collection, today and in the future."
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