Limited to a run of just 100 pieces, Stone Island’s ‘Prototype Research’ series represents the pinnacle of the cult Italian label’s fabric innovations – a spirit of imaginative technical design which has been at the heart of the company since its founding in 1982. It was then, explains Stone Island’s design director Silvio Rivetti, that the company’s fascination with material began with the discovery of Tela Stella, a hardwearing tarpaulin fabric which provided the foundation of the then-burgeoning outerwear brand.
‘We always say that Stone Island was born almost by mistake,’ Rivetti tells Wallpaper*. ‘[When this] beautiful, but rigid, two-sided and two-tone truck tarpaulin arrived at the company – it was so full-bodied that it had to undergo heavy stone wash procedures to tame the structure of the material. The fabric was called Tela Stella and was the beginning of the brand. That first collection defined the value of Stone Island: the fabric is still the starting point of our creative process.’
