SAMIR BANTAL WEARS STONE ISLAND'S 4100062 GHOST PARKA

Samir Bantal is not looking at the camera. He is caught mid sentence behind the scenes of Stone Island's Autumn Winter '026 campaign, in a short down parka zipped to the throat, the fabric catching light the particular way David-TC catches light. Finnish photographer Heikki Kaski shot the frame, not the campaign's usual photographer David Sims, and the caption names its subject in full: Samir Bantal, Architect and Creative Director at AMO, wearing 4100062 David-TC Stone Island Ghost.

The parka is new. The job title is not, and on this campaign the job title is doing as much work as the garment. Stone Island has spent Autumn Winter 026 casting people whose day jobs already resemble fabric research, a filmmaker, an Olympic table tennis champion, a Seoul magazine archivist. An architect who studies systems for a living completes the pattern.

4100062 Is Dyed Under Heat, Not Dipped In It

4100062 David-TC Stone Island Ghost is a short down parka, and David-TC is the finish, not a colorway. Stone Island builds the fabric from a Japanese polyester and polyamide weave with a star shaped cross section, then garment dyes the finished piece under heat and pressure rather than dyeing the fabric before it is cut, a process the brand has described elsewhere in the Ghost line as heat induced compression that transforms the cloth's texture. An anti drop agent goes on afterward, which is why the surface reads dense and faintly worn even on a jacket straight off the line.

The construction around that fabric is straightforward Ghost. Bantal's parka carries a contoured padded drawcord hood, multiple pockets, an adjustable waist, internal elasticated ribbed cuffs and a front two way zip closure, the formula Stone Island has run through peacoats and short parkas across this Ghost season. Nothing about the cut is experimental. The experiment already happened in the dye vat, and it is the only place David-TC pieces ever look different from one another.

Heikki Kaski Shoots the Version David Sims Does Not

Heikki Kaski photographed Bantal off duty, a day after Stone Island ran its formal campaign portrait of him shot by David Sims, directed by Ferdinando Verderi and styled by Max Pearmain. That portrait carried three of Hans Ulrich Obrist's hundred curated questions, and Bantal answered one, on the future, in three words: "Terrifyingly beautiful."

The interview format has run through a wide roster this AW26 season. Bantal follows Nick Love in the 4100064 Gabardine jacket and Skepta in the 4100035 Dense Oxford Nylon TC, both photographed for Compass Inside. Kaski's behind the scenes frame is the same split Stone Island has used before, an off duty candid running alongside the sanctioned campaign image, the way it separated Fakemink's resin finished Q100027 from his original Sims portrait weeks earlier.

AMO Studies Systems the Way Stone Island Studies Fabric

AMO does for Rem Koolhaas's OMA what a materials lab does for a design house, applying architectural thinking to systems outside architecture: fashion, media, agriculture, an airport's flow of people. Bantal has directed the studio since 2016, ran its multi year collaboration with Virgil Abloh and co curated Countryside, The Future with Koolhaas at the Guggenheim in 2020 and again in Doha in 2025. Reading a garment's construction like a floor plan is not a stretch for him, it is close to the job description already.

Stone Island has leaned on that instinct before, putting a rare 2001 archive jacket on Skepta at Reading Festival days before its own cameras arrived, treating an old garment as evidence the way Bantal treats a building. 4100062 is one down parka in a campaign that has now dressed a filmmaker, a table tennis champion and an architect around one research premise, and Bantal is the first of them whose profession is reading what a system is built from.