SKEPTA WORE STONE ISLAND'S RAREST 2001 JACKET AT READING

Coagulated nylon felt, bonded to a sheet of transparent polyurethane film. That is the plain description of the jacket Skepta wore onto The Grid stage at Reading Festival on August 28, 2026, and it is why the internet spent the weekend trying to identify it. The piece is a Stone Island Micro Felt Transparent Cover Jacket from Spring Summer 2001, designed during Paul Harvey's run at the brand, and it looks less like a garment than a piece of industrial packaging that decided to become one.

Twenty five years after it left the factory in Italy, that decision is exactly why the green colorway is one of the harder Stone Island archive pieces to actually source.

August 28. The Grid Stage. One Jacket Nobody Could Place.

Skepta played Reading Festival at 5:45pm on Friday, August 28, 2026, using the set to debut new material from his forthcoming project Fork and Knife. He did it in a jacket that predates most of the crowd's memory of him as a solo artist. The Micro Felt Transparent Cover Jacket is built from an ultra lightweight microfelt, essentially a coagulated nylon fibre pressed into a felt sheet, then laminated with a clear polyurethane film on the outer face. The result is a crumpled, semi opaque surface that catches stage light the way waxed paper catches a window, not the way a nylon shell normally would.

It is garment dyed rather than piece dyed, made in Italy, and cut with the boxy, slightly oversized body Stone Island used across its late 1990s and early 2000s outerwear, the kind of silhouette that reads as workwear until you get close enough to see the surface is doing something a normal jacket cannot do. Archive dealers currently listing SS2001 stock, including Slipstreamvtg and Toohotlimited, describe the same lamination method on jackets they carry from the same run, a detail that lines up with what Skepta had on at Reading.

Paul Harvey Built This Era on Surface, Not Color.

Paul Harvey ran Stone Island's design direction through the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, the period collectors now call the paper room years, named for the felt and film pieces that behaved more like packaging than apparel. This jacket belongs to that run, alongside the Ice jacket and the Raso Gommato line that made the same era famous for treating fabric surface as the innovation, not the badge or the dye vat.

That is a different bet than the one Stone Island is best known for making. The brand's reputation with a wider audience rests on garment dyeing and the compass patch, not on lamination experiments that only survive in single digit quantities today. The same appetite showed up when a Carhartt WIP lunch bag resurfaced on Das Archivee this month, a piece scarce and technical enough to matter only to people who already know what they are looking at. A jacket like Harvey's Micro Felt, worn on a festival stage in front of a phone camera, is exactly the kind of resurfacing that sends buyers hunting.

Stone Island's Own Lab Chose a Different Path Than Harvey Did.

Stone Island still runs material experiments today, but the center of that research moved from Harvey's lamination work to chemistry. Finally Offline has traced that shift through Stone Island's Ravarino dye lab, where more than 60,000 dye recipes have been logged since Massimo Osti founded the company there in 1982. Harvey's Micro Felt jacket does not rely on a dye recipe at all. The color sits underneath a transparent film, which is the opposite approach to the mineral dyed cotton the brand is currently building its Compass Inside campaign around.

Put the two eras side by side and the SS2001 jacket looks like a dead end that never got a sequel, which is precisely why it still gets attention when it turns up on a real body instead of a hanger.

Four Archive Sellers Are Carrying This Jacket. Zero Factories Are Making It Again.

Slipstreamvtg, Toohotlimited, Clochard92 and Mat's Island all currently list pieces from this same Micro Felt Transparent Cover run, spread across cream, dark red, beige and dark green stock, which tells you the jacket survives almost entirely through specialist vintage dealers rather than general resale platforms. Stone Island has not reissued the Micro Felt construction since Harvey's exit, and the brand's current output, including the AW26 Stellina jersey Stone Island put on Xu Xin, leans on knit engineering rather than laminated felt.

That makes the verdict simple. This is not a jacket you wait on, because Stone Island is not building a version two. If a real SS2001 Micro Felt Transparent Cover Jacket surfaces from a dealer who can verify the run, it is a buy for anyone who wants a Harvey era piece that still looks stranger than anything currently on the rack, green colorway or not.