Viral collabs that don't exist, Stone Island explained, and getting your marketing approved
The proof is in the product
Welcome to HYPER. This week, Clayton drops an editorial on what makes Stone Island special, and Oren has a moment about how he’ll never have to design flats again, and then gives a step by step on how to make those luxury collab mockups that have been blowing up everywhere.
A balance of brands rooted in the reality of product experimentation, and a future of the tools that are defining what and how we concept.
Let’s begin.
A brand misunderstood
In Europe, Stone Island is understood differently than the US.
There’s a lived-in knowledge around it. A generational familiarity. People didn’t discover it through pop culture moments or resale spikes; they grew up seeing it worn, beaten up, passed down, argued over.
In Amsterdam, where I (Clayton) reside, I brush shoulders daily with older Dutch men (plumbers, the owner of the local hardware shop, etc.) who often wear the badge.
But in the US, the brand is often reduced to a few things: a logo, a badge, a flex item that floats in and out of cultural relevance depending on who’s wearing it that year.
That reading isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s certainly incomplete.
So, to understand Stone Island, you have to stop reading it as “fashion” and start reading it as research.
The reason Stone Island matters isn’t the same reason a lot of contemporary “luxury” brands matter. It’s not about storytelling first. It’s not about positioning.
It’s about process, and we can trace that philosophy back to its origins.
Massimo Osti and the obsession with process
Massimo Osti founded the brand in 1982, and never started Stone Island around a look. He built it around a question: What happens if we treat garments like experiments?
From the beginning, Osti approached clothing the way an engineer or industrial designer might. He was obsessive about materials. About how fabrics reacted to stress, weather, washing, dyeing.
He wasn’t interested in making something precious. He wanted to see what happened when garments were pushed to their limits.
That mentality (of constant testing, iteration, and failure) is still the backbone of Stone Island today.
But let’s back up.
How it spread
By the mid-1980s, Stone Island had been adopted by the paninari—Italian youth who gathered around Milan’s fast-food joints and treated clothing as a form of identity. They wanted gear that looked expensive but wasn’t delicate. Stone Island fit.
From there, the brand migrated north.
British football fans traveling to European matches brought it home, and by the late ‘80s, Stone Island had become a staple of terrace culture. It wasn’t marketed to these groups. It was discovered by them, passed between cities, traded in pubs, and worn as a badge of taste and toughness.
Through the ‘90s and 2000s, that association deepened. Stone Island became associated with hooliganism, firm culture, and a kind of masculine intensity that overshadowed the product itself. For many people, especially outside Europe, that’s where the story ended.
But the brand kept working. The R&D never paused. While the mythology grew louder, the lab stayed quiet.
The proof is in the puddingproduct
Garment dyeing is what we’ve known the brand for, but it wasn’t for the vibes. It was a way to recontextualize finished pieces and see how color behaved when applied at the end of the process rather than at the beginning.
And in an industry where so many brands lead with narrative because they don’t have much else to stand on, Stone Island does the opposite. The story comes after the work.
And whether you agree or not, that’s why the brand feels closer, philosophically, to American institutions like Filson, Patagonia, or L.L. Bean than it does to most modern luxury labels.
Innovation isn’t just a tagline for a campaign; it’s the infrastructure.
Avi Gold, founder of Better™ Gift Shop in Toronto, put it plainly when we talked about where Stone Island sits today.
“In true Stone form, it pretty much sits above what everyone else is doing,” he told me. “The reason a lot of us got into the brand was because of their approach to fabrics, techniques, applications. They made timeless garments that withstood the test of time and continue to do so.”
What stood out wasn’t just reverence for the past but also an emphasis on continuity. Stone Island doesn’t romanticize its archive. It reworks it. Old techniques resurface decades later, adjusted, refined, stress-tested again. The same curiosity, applied repeatedly.
“With the rise of accessibility and everyone trying to make product or have a ‘brand,’” Avi continued, “Stone is one of the few brands that continues to stand outside the box and prove themselves through fabrics and their overall approach. It’s like wearable art.”
That idea (proof through product) is increasingly rare. Especially in a market flooded with premium branding and thin substance.
Community as a form of research
And Stone Island is one of the only brands that treats community not as “marketing,” but as another research surface. The clearest proof is the brand’s own framing: Community as a Form of Research, a campaign concept that puts real devotees at the center rather than hired faces.
The point is not celebrity, it’s evidence. When you photograph people who have lived with the clothes for years, you get a different kind of credibility, and a different kind of information.
What pieces do they keep.
How do they wear them.
What do they return to.
The campaign’s interviews, guided by Hans Ulrich Obrist, turn fandom into field notes, and the short film The Compass Inside makes the same case from another angle: this brand is built through the people who wear it and the people who make it.
That’s what Avi is picking up on.
Stone Island’s community is not a vibe layer added at the end. It’s part of how the brand pressure-tests relevance over time, in the same way it pressure-tests fabrics, dyes, and finishes.
Utility, experimentation, and meaning
Detroit-based Artist Tyrrell Winston approaches materials differently, but the overlap is striking. His work often centers on found objects… things already worn, marked by time, embedded with history.
“When materials wear and change over time, it becomes part of the story,” he told me. “Stone’s fabrics act in a similar way.”
That perspective reframes Stone Island’s obsession with experimentation. It’s not about perfection. It’s about allowing garments to evolve.
“I have no interest in art without experimentation,” Tyrrell said. “That doesn’t mean making things haphazardly. It means not being afraid to go places others haven’t, even if that comes at the cost of not ‘nailing it’ for a while.”
That willingness to be uncomfortable, to fail publicly, and to prioritize learning over immediate payoff is baked into Stone Island’s DNA. And it’s why the brand resists simplification.
Value, in that sense, isn’t fixed. It accrues.
“So much contemporary art could be perceived as nothing if it wasn’t for the story and context,” Tyrrell added. “Stories that stand the test of time become more important than the object, but in turn, they elevate the object.”
Stone Island understands that balance. The product carries the story, not the other way around.
Stone Island rewards your curiosity
Stone Island doesn’t explain itself loudly. It doesn’t flatten its ideas for mass appeal. It rewards curiosity. If you want to understand it, you have to spend time with the product. You have to care how things are made.
That’s why it continues to resonate across such different groups. Football fans. Artists. Designers. Engineers. Collectors. People who don’t dress alike but share a respect for process.
Stone Island isn’t timeless because it looks the same year after year. It’s timeless because it never stops innovating. The brand is a reminder that in a world full of empty promises, the rarest thing is still proof.
And Stone Island, above all else, is proof.
How to do those mockups we’re seeing blow up
The highest performing content on the designer internet now, is collabs that don’t exist.
You probably saw this one first, by the time it hit critical mass, it had moved from beyond its starting post (below) and AI content aggregators, and into mainstream where it wasn’t even mentioned it was a concept, people assumed it was real.
272k likes
The trend continued - this one was hot on its heals, performing nearly as well, picturing Loewe in kids products… 161k likes
And now about to outperform the original, the Miu Miu x Smeg…232k likes
All of these are AI, they gain massive attention for their creators and for the brands themselves, and I wondered…. How easy is this to do?
Below I’m sharing some of my Freepik workflows to do similar items
Freepik works in “spaces” very similar to a board or canvas in most software.
Firs, you, create a space.
Then load in references, which you connect with nodes and execute an image generation, video generation, alteration, which you can select settings for, rerun at will, and then run groups of items through using their “lists” function.
I have been using this a lot to do flats. It actually pains me the amount of time I have spent in my life in Illustrator doming this to have it now just be…done. The exact workflow I’m doing as I plan my next shoe bag releases.
My prompt: “Create precise product-design flat technical drawings from the reference photos. Match exact shape, proportions, contours, panel lines, seams, and functional details (buttons, ports, hinges, fasteners). Remove all branding, logos, decorative patterns, and text. Do NOT add dimensions, annotations, scale bars, watermarks, or extra text. Use neutral white background, vector-like consistent linework, flat neutral gray fills, subtle grayscale material shading only. Align and scale all views consistently for direct use in modeling. Keep strictly faithful to the original geometry.”
But getting to these collabs, simply generating a fabric or image swap is very very easy, I’m working on some interior ideas and have been doing this just to visualize couches in our space and seeing if I can use some custom material from my brand work potentially.
I bring in the materials, render out couch angles, connect them with a node to a image generation and prompt“render the couch with this fabric, which is a closeup”.
If you want to show your ideas but don’t have the budget… now is the time to show them on social media and at least get attention.
And if you are a designer, get a ton of your time back, but also realize this is happening across the board, and leading to. A ton of “technicals” that aren’t very useful for manufacturers, and a complete democratization of people being able to send items for production that would previously have been way out of their league.
I would note that the actual intense obsession with the user experience is paramount, the slant and placement of the pockets, how the object fits in a hand, the size grading.
The knowledge of materials, their application, their availability becomes paramount, designers who are able to survive through a mass democratization of their craft will be far deeper in supply chain than ever before.
Marketing, Approved
The latest Brandfathers podcast is live and tackling an important topic: how to actually get your interesting marketing initiatives approved. 20m, recommended.