STONE ISLAND LETS COLLECTORS RUN ITS SELFRIDGES SHOP

Stone Island opened a six week takeover of Selfridges' Corner Shop on September 21 called Selected Works '82-'026, The Collector Series, and handed the room to Willo Perron, the Montreal born designer who has spent two decades building stages for Kanye West and Jay-Z. The show runs to November 6 in the department store's ground floor concept space, and its premise is simple: let the people who actually own the archive decide what the archive looks like, rather than let the brand alone curate its own retrospective.

Willo Perron Built This Before He Built Yeezy's Stores

Willo Perron, born in 1974 in Montreal, got his start designing American Apparel stores in the early 2000s before a meeting with Kanye West turned into Yeezy store interiors and, in 2008, his first live show design for West's Glow in the Dark tour. The relationship never stopped. He has since built album art and tour design for Jay-Z's 4:44, stage work for Frank Ocean, Drake, Bruno Mars, Coldplay and Marilyn Manson, and won a Grammy for art directing St Vincent's 2017 Masseduction. Wallpaper named him its Designer of the Year for 2026, the same year Stone Island handed him a six week retail space instead of a stadium. Perron's furniture and product design work for BD Barcelona and Knoll runs alongside the tour and album work, meaning the hands framing a Frank Ocean stage are also the ones deciding how a 1989 Ice Jacket gets lit under Selfridges' ceiling. His brief at Selfridges is described as an evolving spatial system, soft structures and modular components built to be reconfigured, not fixed for the run.

A 1989 Ice Jacket Sits Next to Pieces No One Else Can Buy

The Collector Series pulls specific garments out of Stone Island's own back catalogue, a Spring 1993 reflective jacket, a Fall 2001 Monofilament Camo piece and a Fall 1989 Ice Jacket built from thermosensitive fabric that changes color with heat, a technology Stone Island was already running experiments on nearly four decades ago. None of that touches the 2001 green micro felt transparent jacket Skepta wore to Reading Festival, a different garment from that year, but the coincidence puts two separate 2001 pieces into circulation within a month of each other. Selfridges also gets three pieces built only for the shop: a hand treated leather organza parka in burnt orange, a reflective treatment denim research jumpsuit and a panno speciale stand collar jacket, none of which will exist anywhere else once the run ends November 6. Putting a 1989 fabric experiment on one shop floor next to a garment finished this year turns the room into a working timeline instead of a static rail of old clothes.

Collectors, Not the Brand, Choose What Sells

The premise that separates this from a normal archive exhibition is who is selling. Stone Island is inviting collectors from around the world to bring personally curated vintage pieces into the space and sell them directly, putting private archives in front of Selfridges shoppers instead of keeping them in the brand's own vault. Every piece changing hands in a six week pop up raises the question a badge and ART number answers on any Stone Island garment, whether the compass patch and the four digit code inside the collar actually match the decade the seller claims. Selfridges is betting that letting outside collectors set the terms, not curating a closed retrospective itself, makes the six weeks worth the real estate.

Forty Four Years Get Six Weeks and One Room

Selected Works spans '82 to '026 in its own title, forty four years since Massimo Osti founded the brand condensed into a single reconfigurable room that closes November 6 and will not travel anywhere after. Stone Island is treating its own history as inventory here, garments from 1989, 1993 and 2001 sold alongside pieces stitched this year and three that exist nowhere but this shop. A brand old enough to have invented the fabric technology its own archive pieces are now sold on the strength of is still finding new ways to make forty four years feel like they are still in motion.