Back in April, we visited Italy’s fashion capital, Milan, during Milan Design Week, arguably the largest and most prestigious furniture and design fair in the world. Nestled within the back streets of Milan in the Via Savona district—considered one of Milan’s trendiest areas with new boutique hotels, numerous bars and restaurants, and a vibrant nightlife—the area is also home to some high-profile names in fashion, including Stone Island, who’s very own exhibition hall resides there.
While many retailers focused on furniture and design, Stone Island was one of the few brands that emphasised clothing. This is because they consider their prototype releases as the epitome of design and research, collaborating with the Stone Island Research Team and a myriad of industry specialists across fields like engineering, sports, materials, and marine technology.
The Stone Island Prototype 8 series, the eighth release from Stone Island, features a limited edition artifact produced in small quantities, usually around 100 pieces, each individually numbered. These pieces push the boundaries of design and production to such an extent that mass production is not feasible, reflecting significant research, development, and construction efforts. This makes the prototype pieces a serious collector’s dream.
The fabric for the Prototype 8 series was created in collaboration with three industrial partners and features a multifaceted linen textile base as a natural reinforcement material. It undergoes subsequent needle-cohesion to a non-woven fabric veil, state-of-the-art inkjet printing with pigments, and double lamination of aliphatic polyurethane film.
The finished product is a cape-style piece inspired by the very first Stone Island collection from 1982, serving as a functional reference to a military garment that could evolve into a tent.
Inside the exhibition, which was open from April 15 to 21, a dramatic wall display of thirty-two interconnected Stone Island capes served as a visual testament to the material’s versatility and the collection’s artistic vision. A selection of limited and numbered T-shirts and tote bags celebrating Prototype Series 08 were available at the exhibition and well be in selected Stone Island stores in late May closer to the official release of the Series 8.
Stone Island’s Prototype Research_Series, now in its eighth season, has become a staple in the brand’s yearly seasonal output, alongside other endeavors including the Ghost and Marina lines. During last year’s Milan Design Week, Stone Island presented Liquid Crystal Heat Reactive: a high-tech nylon canvas fabric coated with reactive helical-shaped cholesteric liquid crystal ink. Stone Island has always been ahead of the curve in technical fabrics, and its ongoing Prototype Research_Series is a testament to that innovation. Watch the Full Video on our YouTube Channel
The Stone Island Research & Design team is a collective that continually innovates new fibers, textiles, and techniques. Every Stone Island garment is the result of this constant innovation. Sometimes, the new processes experimentally developed by the team are so complex that they cannot yet be widely industrialised. To showcase those advanced techniques, Stone Island developed the Prototype Research series, the first in it’s season, in 2016 and has released a new prototype nearly every year, aside from 2020. This series applies cutting-edge methods to very limited production runs, making these unique pieces seriously rare and collectable.
