STEPHEN GRAHAM WEARS STONE ISLAND'S GHOST LEATHER COACH

Stone Island's Autumn Winter 026 campaign started with Skepta answering Hans Ulrich Obrist's questions about his mother and the meaning of freedom. Three subjects later it has reached Stephen Graham, photographed behind the scenes by Heikki Kaski in the 0100004 Bonded Rubberised Leather Ghost, a coach jacket that trades the season's usual nylon for lambskin. Community as a Form of Research keeps adding names, and the jacket changes shape every time.

Stephen Graham Wears the 0100004 Ghost Coach Jacket

The 0100004 is a coach jacket cut from lambskin rather than the technical nylon that carries most of Stone Island's Ghost line, sprayed with a finish that reads as rubberised and technical rather than as traditional leather. Graham appears in a behind the scenes frame from the shoot, the sprayed surface catching light the way a rubberised coating does rather than the matte sheen of untreated hide, credited to photographer Heikki Kaski under the hashtags StoneIslandAW26 and TheCompassInside. It is a leather piece dressed to behave like a technical fabric, the reverse of what most fashion houses do when they push leather toward luxury instead of utility.

Lambskin Gets a Rubberised Spray, Not a Rubber Coating

Actual rubber coating sits on top of a fabric as a separate layer, thick enough to feel distinct from the material underneath. A sprayed finish works differently: it is applied directly to the lambskin's surface and cures into it, changing how the hide catches light without adding the stiffness a true rubber laminate would. That distinction is why the 0100004 can read as technical outerwear in photographs while still moving and creasing like leather in person, a compromise the fabric's own construction makes rather than a marketing description doing the work.

Stone Island runs this kind of surface experiment through its Research Department, the same division responsible for garment dyeing whole jackets after construction rather than dyeing the fabric beforehand. Applying a rubberised spray to a hide that already has its own grain and texture is a similar bet: let the base material keep its natural character underneath a technical layer, instead of erasing it with a full coating that would behave the same on any leather regardless of quality.

Heikki Kaski Has Shot This Brand Before, and Not Just Menswear

Kaski also photographed Samir Bantal, the director of OMA's research studio AMO, in Stone Island's 4100062 Ghost parka for the same AW26 campaign, and his separate work for the brand includes a portrait of Oasis's Liam Gallagher. A photographer moving between an architecture theorist, a Britpop frontman and a Bafta winning actor for the same label says more about Stone Island's casting range this season than any single jacket does. The brand is not building one archetype. It is building a cast list.

Four Subjects, One Campaign, Six Weeks

Graham is the fourth Community as a Form of Research subject FO has covered since early September, after Skepta's formal campaign portrait in the Dense Oxford Nylon TC jacket, Fakemink's resin finished Q100027, and Samir Bantal's Ghost parka days later. Four subjects, four different Research Department finishes, one campaign concept. Stone Island is not releasing a lookbook. It is releasing a rotating cast wearing a rotating set of finishing techniques, one behind the scenes image at a time.

Adolescence Won Graham Two Emmys and a BAFTA This Year

Graham wrote and starred in Adolescence, the Netflix limited series he wrote alongside Jack Thorne, and it won him two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and, in May 2026, the BAFTA for Best Leading Actor, with the show also taking Best Limited Drama. That run puts him in a different category from Stone Island's usual campaign mix of directors, architects and rappers. He is the first Community as a Form of Research subject this season who won a scripted performance award for playing someone else, rather than being photographed as himself in a research studio or a festival tent.

Philip Barantini directed all four episodes of Adolescence in a single continuous take each, a production choice that turned the show into as much a filmmaking story as a performance one. Owen Cooper and Christine Tremarco won supporting acting awards from the same run, meaning three quarters of the show's central family unit left the 2026 awards season with a trophy. Graham arrives at a Stone Island campaign carrying that entire year with him, not just a single credit.

The Coach Jacket Joins a Season Built on Contrast

Stone Island's wider Autumn Winter 026 delivery has spent the season pairing opposites on purpose. The 4100035 Dense Oxford Nylon TC rebuilds a cotton shirting weave in heavy nylon, the technique Skepta wore for his own campaign portrait. The 0100004 runs the opposite direction, taking a material associated with heavy technical treatment, sprayed lambskin, and finishing it to look like the rubberised nylon the rest of the collection is actually made from. One jacket borrows a fabric's structure. The other borrows its finish. Both land on the same Research Department logic: change what a material appears to be without changing what it is.

The compass badge on Graham's sleeve is the one constant across all four subjects and every finish the campaign has shown so far, traced back to founder Massimo Osti's own sailboat and unchanged since 1982. Everything else this season changes fabric, finish and face. That badge does not.