MILAN — Ten years after arriving in SoHo, Stone Island is relocating its New York flagship and continuing the global rollout of the brand’s next-generation retail concept.

“This is very exciting, a big step for Stone Island, and part of the strategy to develop its retail network,” said chief executive officer Robert Triefus of the new store, which opens to the public on Thursday. “We are on an ongoing journey to progressively roll out this concept that we have developed with Amo/Oma over the years.”

Triefus recalled that when he joined Stone Island in June 2023 from Gucci, the first store under this collaboration had opened in Chicago. “In some ways, it was more of a test bed for what was to come. With any retail concept, the beauty of it is that you learn as you go, especially when you are trying to innovate. As always, Stone Island puts material  innovation at the center of everything we do.”

Developed with Samir Bantal, director at Amo, the store was designed in collaboration with Jason Long, partner at Oma N.Y. Located at 70 Greene Street, it was conceived to reflect the brand’s pillars of material research, community and cultural programming, said Triefus. He added that Bantal had spent time at the brand’s headquarters in Ravarino, Italy, “getting to know the company and what material innovation means to it.”

Bantal described Ravarino as “a kind of incredible treasury of knowledge, experience, testing, experimentation, but also innovation. And that’s when you really see what the brand means, it almost unravels in front of your eyes.”

He recalled being impressed by the fact that “before the collection was designed, the colors of that season were determined, and already quite precise.” Seeing how the different color recipes were employed depending on the different materials was “really eye-opening, very magical. This is trying to really fully control your product from A to Z, and I thought that that approach of treating materials could be something interesting as a connection to its architecture,” he said.

Bantal opted for cork as a natural material to be treated in different ways and easily recycled. “We found one company that was experimenting with cooking it under high pressure, changing the appearance, changing the color of it. And then we decided to treat it even more by spraying it with sand, or blasting it with sand, so that it would get a much rougher kind of texture, and then apply a slight coat to it, so that you actually get a certain uniformity in the color and that felt as if we were actually applying a kind of Stone Island approach to the architecture,” Bantal continued.

This was done with other materials such as metal sprayed with a mixture of resin and sand with a corrugated effect, glass and stained pine. “These surfaces not only define the visual identity of the space but also provide functional benefits such as sound and humidity control,” said Bantal.

Triefus observed that “the other part of Stone Island’s DNA is obviously this community culture. Samir and his team have thought about how the stores can respect and celebrate the community in the experience, and I would highlight in New York, what is particularly exciting about the store is that the notion of shared experience is built into the thinking.”

Music has always been part of the culture of Stone Island, he explained, and on the lower floor is “more of a destination for an enhanced client experience that also includes a DJ station, a more relaxed environment where people can enjoy spending time with books, magazines, thinking again about how we can bring community into the overall experience in the store.”

Triefus said that relocations are key in the brand’s retail strategy, “where we don’t feel we have the optimal location,” as was the case in New York or Paris, where moving just a few meters up on Rue Saint Honoré led to a much stronger performance. “In New York, again, we’re moving pretty much 100 meters up the street, but the adjacencies on Greene Street attract the kind of qualitative traffic that makes the difference, and we will do the same in Rome next year.”

Covering  3,175 square feet, the new store is located in a ground and basement level of a classic SoHo cast-iron building and carries the full  Stone Island product range, including the Ghost, Marina, and Stellina sub-collections.

The basement floor of the new store is almost like the lounge space, a more intimate experiential zone for private fittings, appointments and gatherings and conceived as a speakeasy-style club space, welcoming the brand’s community through music, books and a bar. Here, a bespoke loudspeaker sound system by Friendly Pressure is activated through a DJ booth in the space for special events and cultural programming.

On Saturday, Stone Island will present “Friendly Pressure: Studio One_NY” — a genre-spanning sonic journey that flows from ambient and jazz to drill, Afrobeats, and club-driven dance music. Following its debut during Milan Design Week 2025, this second chapter continues the collaboration between the brand and Friendly Pressure, the bespoke sound system studio founded by Shivas Brown in London.

As part of the new opening, Stone Island is offering a special-edition Uneven Ripstop Prismatico short parka, available exclusively at the New York flagship. Crafted from ripstop cotton, it is dyed with a specific black corrosive dye and rubberized on the exterior with a shiny, fine-grained polyurethane film to achieve a prismatic effect. The garment is then washed to remove the pigment, which remains visible along the seams and in areas where the fabric is layered and it is treated using specialized double-dyeing techniques. In a unique Blue Marine shade, it includes back branding with the geographical coordinates of the New York flagship.

In New York, like in Chicago and other recent stores, Stone Island introduced “a creative collective empowering young creators to be part of the storytelling within the store,” said Triefus.

He cited, for example, the 6: AM glass makers from Venice that treat glass with a texture. “The whole idea is that the store becomes a kind of almost like an ecosystem of the brand itself, connecting to music, filmmaking,  design, furniture design.”

As part of an ongoing creative collaboration platform, the store features custom design contributions: lighting by Tim Hooijmans, lounge furniture by Tim Teven and the Supersedia bench by Markus Töll. A custom audio system is  developed by Ledongil Workshop.

“For 43 years, we have become very well known for the effort we put into the product and in the retail experience,” said Triefus. “If we can bring that sense of experience through community, that’s the win-win of the other side of our personality as a brand.

“This new store cements our foundations for long-term growth in North America. At Stone Island, we have what we call our lighthouse cities. We have nine of them in the world, and New York is one of our nine lighthouse cities, where we want the brand across its direct-to-consumer and our wholesale partners to represent the best that we can be, through  store design, the offer,  the animations. So the lighthouse cities get a disproportionate amount of our effort and our focus, not only because those cities, generally speaking, have large populations and therefore you’re engaging with an important community, but they tend to have a halo effect on the rest of the market,” said Triefus.  

The other lighthouse cities are Milan, Paris, London, Munich, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul and Los Angeles.

The New York store is “evidence of our commitment to ensuring that the city is a lighthouse for Stone Island in the U.S. as a market, which is performing with some energy, because we see a customer base that is perhaps not traveling as much as it has done in the past, and consequently there is more shopping being done at home. And for Stone Island, it is a market that is still underdeveloped and offers growth potential,” both at retail and wholesale, ranging from Saks Global to Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom and some independent partner, the CEO said.

Stone Island has two other openings this year in North America, one in South Coast Plaza on Nov. 15. “We’re very happy, for the first time, to have a store in a mall environment in America,” said Triefus. At the end of October or early November,  a store will open at the Yorkdale Shopping Centre in Toronto. Stone Island opened a regional office in America in January 2023.