In a quiet corner of Stone Island’s flagship London store in Soho, the brand’s Italian chair, Carlo Rivetti, is talking about darts. “You see these big fat guys,” says Rivetti, who is sporting whiskers that make him look more like a trawlerman than a fashion magnate. “Pom … pom … pom,” he adds, imitating the noise a dart makes when it hits the board.
Darts is possibly the one British subculture that Rivetti’s brand hasn’t touched: football casuals, rappers, politicians, musicians and athletes have all reached for “Stoney” as it is known in the UK, as a sign of masculine cool. Darts might just be the final frontier.
Rivetti, 68, sits down for the interview directly under a massive poster of himself beside Liam Gallagher – one of the models for the latest collection. As we talk, shoppers take shots of Rivetti, who surreptitiously tokes on a vape throughout, with the occasional double take.
“The problem is that I enjoy to talk,” says Rivetti. “If I am in a bar and I see someone wearing Stone Island, I start talking.” He’ll ask them where they bought their item and if they’re enjoying it, before buying them a drink. “The garment you put on your skin, the food you put inside yourself, it’s a very close relationship.”
Stone Island launched in 1982 as an offshoot of the late Italian garment engineer and fashion designer, Massimo Osti’s, growing menswear empire, which already included CP Company and the Boneville brand. Stoney was different. Osti – a former graphic designer who was into far-left politics and had no fashion training – used military tarpaulin and garment-dyed his jackets, chose outrageously loud colour palettes and created silhouettes no one else would dare try. In the process he won admirers, including the Milanese paninari, the yuppie kids who sported exclusive brands and admired American 80s excess. Its English name is fairly arbitrary – he likes the two words – but was inspired by Osti’s love of Joseph Conrad, who is said to have used the words frequently in his novels.
After Osti’s departure in the mid-90s, Rivetti took the brand’s helm – signing off on selling a 30% stake in Stone Island’s parent company to Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, in 2017, while Stone Island’s sales grew an average of 18% annually from 2011 to 2020 after collaborations with streetwear brands, including Supreme, and high-end labels such as Dior. In 2020, Rivetti sold his 70% of Stone Island’s parent company to Moncler, which also bought the 30% owned by Temasek, creating “a new luxury conglomerate”. Stone Island was valued at £1.1bn at the time of the deal.
Rivetti is in town for a couple of things: a signing for the re-released Rizzoli coffee-table book that details the brand’s history, and a screening of a new film about the brand’s factory in Ravarino, near Bologna. At the book signing, fans – who are among menswear’s most loyal – turned up in rare pieces Rivetti hadn’t seen in years. “It was really emotional, because I saw all my life in some way with these unbelievable pieces,” says Rivetti. “When I am a little depressed I come to London.”
Precisely why Stone Island took off in the UK is still hotly debated. Most histories pinpoint the European Championships of 1992 when England fans came back after a dismal group-stage exit with bags full of the latest Stone Island, bought (mostly) from the celebrated Genius store in Copenhagen, as the moment the brand properly arrived in the UK before filtering out through football culture into acid house and seemingly anywhere groups of men gathered.
“The football casuals of the 1980s were, in many ways, the modern-day equivalents of the young men embarking on the Grand Tour in the 18th century,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “Rather than bringing back art and antiquities, they brought back Italian menswear.”
For Rivetti, a key moment was when a certain footballer called Eric Cantona bought several pieces from Flannels in Manchester, which was a tastemaking hotspot during the Madchester era. “He paid for them with his own money!” adds Rivetti
Whatever route it took, the brand has changed British menswear and pop culture. The newly reissued Rizzoli book shows Duran Duran, So Solid Crew, Oasis and the Happy Mondays all “getting the badge in” – the expression for when someone purposefully ensures the brand’s signature nautical badge is in shot. Its newest face is, of course, Liam Gallagher. But it is worth remembering – as pointed out in Magnetic, Tony Rivers and James Burnett’s exhaustive history of the brand’s early years – that by the late 90s, Stoney was so ubiquitous that Dale Winton, Philip Schofield and Ronan Keating also sported it on children’s TV, leading some fans to desert it.
These days, the badge still appears in interesting places way beyond the terraces. The character of Rob in Industry, the BBC’s compulsive show about trainee bankers, cloaks himself in Stoney as if it is chain mail; a working-class financier, he has status anxiety. Stoney made appearances on Top Boy – and then one of the series’ main backers, Drake, began wearing it. Keir Starmer has also sported it.
“Like anything cool it inevitably gets co-opted by the uncool and that’s kind of how I feel about Stone Island now,” says Sam Diss, host of The English Disease podcast, which investigates the legacy of football hooliganism. “If I see someone ‘getting the badge in’ 1732178952, then they’re either doing it ironically or they’re someone on Sky Sports, like Gary Neville.”
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The brand’s relationship with football is a tricky one. Stone Island’s chief executive Robert Treifus refers euphemistically to the brand’s connections to the “football community”, but for many the badge is synonymous with a certain type of loutish fan behaviour. That image was cemented after the brand appeared in hooligan flicks Green Street and Football Factory, while it’s also not unusual to see the odd Stone Island piece on far-right marches.
According to Diss, for many, Stone Island’s football connections are its strongest of any subculture. “I didn’t know anyone who wore it growing up in the East End … it wasn’t until you went to football and you would see them occasionally pop out of the crowd with these unusual colours, or you’d see some CP Company goggles or a badge poking out of a pub,” he says. “You could see that the people wearing them thought they were the daddy.”
Is Rivetti, a lifelong Inter Milan fan until he bought Modena FC in 2021, proud of the brand’s football connection? “Not about the hooligans,” he says, before referencing the Heysel disaster, which he witnessed first hand. “I was in a stadium in Brussels when 39 people were killed, so violence is something that I really hate.”
“I’m proud if sports people recognise Stone Island now. Thank God hooliganism has disappeared,” he says, somewhat forgivingly, of the hooliganism that does still bubble to the surface, even if it is minimal compared with what it was in the 90s. “I think that in England, you do an unbelievably good job on this. In Italy, we still have problems, but I hope that we will be able to solve this.”
Rivetti doesn’t shy away from the fact that the brand is unashamedly masculine: the DJ Peggy Gou became the first woman to feature in a Stone Island advert this year. “I see people coming into the shop and trying on the clothes,” he says, before standing up and puffing out his chest. “They stand there like this … they get a bit taller. They feel ‘figgy’, you say cool, we say this.”
These days, look in most stadium away ends and you’ll see the badge, but equally, rappers such as Kano and Dave have embraced it, while Liam Gallagher ensures its Madchester roots are still strong. When the Moncler sale went through, Rivetti was quoted as saying: “Stone Island is more than a clothing brand. Stone Island is a religion.”
So does that make him the pope? “No,” he says, laughing. But when I ask him why he has become one of the faces of the brands, he shifts focus. “I have six grandchildren, and I want them to remember what Carlo has done in these last 40 years. In my opinion, it is important to show that behind the brand there is also the pope.”