STONE ISLAND AW26 PITS A NYLON VEST AGAINST A RESIN ANORAK

Nylon woven thin enough to read as paper. That is the base cloth behind G100016, Stone Island's Monofilament Organza utility vest for Autumn Winter 026, and monofilament nylon in this weight traces back to industrial water filtration screens before any design team touched it. Q100035, the season's other headline piece, argues the opposite. It is a brushed nylon and nylon canvas anorak with the reverse resin coated, adding weight and reinforcement exactly where the vest strips both away. One collection, two garments, two opposite bets on what technical outerwear should weigh.

Stone Island has run this argument since Massimo Osti opened the brand's research lab in 1982, and Autumn Winter 026 is not choosing a side. It is presenting both.

G100016 Weighs Almost Nothing and Costs the Most to Get Right

G100016 is a utility vest built from nylon monofilament organza, a fabric with a papery, sheer hand that holds its shape without any lining underneath. The construction carries multiple bellows pockets, adjustable tape detailing, and front snap fastening straps, all of which depend on the organza staying stiff enough to hold a pocket's shape without a backing layer.

That stiffness is the hard part. Woven monofilament, unlike a standard multifilament nylon, is made from a single continuous strand per yarn, the same principle used in fine mesh water filtration cloth. It produces a fabric that is lightweight and structurally crisp rather than soft and drapey, which is why the vest can carry hardware, straps, and bellows pockets without sagging. There is no insulation built into the cloth itself. The vest is a shell, and it reads as one.

Q100035 Does the Opposite Job in the Same Fabric Family

Q100035 is the Uneven Pigment Dyed Nylon Smerigliato anorak, and it starts from a different fabric logic entirely: a blend of brushed nylon and nylon canvas rather than sheer monofilament. The canvas half of that blend is resin coated on the reverse, a finishing step that adds weight to the fabric and reinforces the anorak's most delicate construction points, the seams, cuffs, and pocket bags that take the most stress in wear.

Finally Offline already covered Stone Island's Nylon Smerigliato treatment on the AW26 overshirt, where the sanded, unevenly pigment dyed nylon read as a lightweight layering piece. Q100035 takes that same dyeing language and puts it on a heavier, resin backed canvas built to survive weather rather than a photo shoot. Smerigliato means sanded in Italian, and the abrasion process that gives the fabric its brushed, cotton like hand works differently on this heavier canvas than it did on the overshirt's lighter cloth. Same treatment, different substrate, different job.

Arc'teryx Buys the Membrane. Stone Island Grows Its Own Chemistry.

Arc'teryx just ran its fifteenth Alpine Academy in Chamonix, putting climbers through shells built around Gore-Tex Pro, a membrane the brand licenses rather than manufactures itself. Stone Island's play is structurally different. The Research Department that Osti founded treats dye penetration, fiber weight, and surface finish as its actual technology, which is how the same collection produces a monofilament vest with no coating at all and a resin backed canvas anorak in the same season.

That distinction is the whole argument for buying into Stone Island over a brand built on a licensed membrane. A Gore-Tex shell performs identically whether Arc'teryx, Salomon, or a dozen other labels put their name on it, because the membrane supplier did the engineering. G100016 and Q100035 could not be built by a competitor buying the same raw nylon, because the organza's monofilament weave and the anorak's resin coating are both proprietary finishing decisions made in house. The same research logic built Stone Island's Palazzo Fusco flagship in Naples with OMA and AMO, where the retail space itself functions as a display case for four decades of fabric archive.

Layer the Vest. Trust the Anorak Alone in the Rain.

Neither G100016 nor Q100035 has a confirmed retail price yet, and Stone Island's utility vests and technical anoraks have historically landed in different brackets, so a real price to craft verdict has to wait for the drop. What holds up now is the construction math. The vest earns its keep as a shell over knitwear, since monofilament organza carries no insulation of its own; wearing it alone in cold weather misreads the garment. The anorak works standing on its own, since the resin coated canvas is doing the water resistant work the vest was never built for.

Two style codes, one collection, and a clear thesis: Stone Island is not choosing between lightweight construction and reinforced weather protection for Autumn Winter 026. It is proving the Research Department can build both from the same season's fabric lab, while Arc'teryx and every other brand running on a licensed Gore-Tex membrane can only build one.