STONE ISLAND TRACTION CONTROL BURNS THE COMPASS INTO MONZA

Stone Island's fifth Navigation Series chapter, Traction Control, was shot by Liam MacRae at Monza, and its main image is a rider mid burnout whose tire marks form the Stone Island compass on the track. A close up shows the rider's helmet wrapped in the same emblem. Large billboards carrying the images have gone up at several points around the Monza circuit, and the chapter belongs to the brand's fall winter 2026 season.

When the chapter first surfaced on November 3, it came with a title, a year and a photographer's name, and nothing else. The coverage since fills in the place, the stunt and the billboards, and it changes what the chapter is.

The Title Names the System the Image Defeats

Traction control is the system that stops a driven wheel from spinning faster than the road can grip. A burnout is the opposite: a wheel spun until the rubber smokes and stays behind on the tarmac. Stone Island titled the chapter after the safeguard against the stunt it shows, and the tire marks do the drawing.

The compass is no longer fitted to the vehicle. In Reinvent the Wheel, the April 2024 chapter, it sat on a spare tire cover and on the custom wheels of an all terrain vehicle crossing snow and mud. In Traction Control the vehicle writes it, and the rider's helmet carries it as well.

Five Chapters, Five Places, Four Gaps

Search + Rescue arrived in April 2023 with a helicopter hovering over a crew rappelling by rope and a helipad with the compass set into the landing zone. Shedding Light followed in September 2023, Reinvent the Wheel in April 2024 and Under the Radar on August 18, 2025. Traction Control is the fifth.

The gaps between chapters ran about five months, seven months and sixteen months, and the new one lands about 14 months after Under the Radar. The calendar has drifted with them. Two of the first three chapters ran in April, the month the series launched; the fourth came in August and the fifth reaches November, inside the fall winter season.

Under the Radar went under water. A sonar screen picks up a signal that leads to a circular stone sculpture echoing the compass on the ocean floor, shot off the coast of the Bahamas with a local dive team trained in shark spotting. The Drum reported that no AI was used and that every frame was captured on location. Traction Control keeps the series on location too, with its pictures back at the place they were made.

Billboards at the Circuit Turn the Campaign Into Signage

FashionUnited and Pause Mag both describe large billboards showing the images around the Monza circuit. A diptych printed that large beside a track is read first by people who came for the racing, not for fashion, which is the audience a burnout is made for.

The series began in April 2023 as a run of visual diptychs that put modern navigational tools into different terrains, with the compass in every scene. Stone Island ties it to Massimo Osti, the founder who built the emblem around his interest in navigation, travel and exploration. A track is a navigation tool of a plain kind: a marked route with a start, a line and a surface that either grips or lets go.

MacRae Has Shot a Good Part of the Brand's Autumn

Liam MacRae is also credited with the image of Carmelo Anthony in Stone Island's bonded rubberized leather jacket, an edition of 20 pieces sold exclusively at Saks New York and Saks.com. That puts his name on a limited jacket and on a burnout within weeks of each other.

The portraits in the autumn winter 2026 campaign work differently, because they name a person and a garment. Skepta in the resin coated 41NS001 and Stephen Graham in lasered denim are two of seven portraits in that campaign. The Navigation Series names a tool and a place, and leaves the clothing to the compass on the sleeve.

The Compass Is Also the First Authenticity Check

The emblem has a second job on the rack. Its compass badge construction, the snap button and the stitched edge colour, is the first check for telling an authentic jacket from a counterfeit, so the campaign and the authentication test are about one object.

The brand that runs the campaign has been owned by Moncler Group since Moncler closed its purchase of Stone Island on March 31, 2021, for a 1.15 billion euro valuation. The press release for Part 4 is still hosted on the Moncler Group site, yet the cadence of the series has stayed its own, with no fixed month and no fixed gap.

Five chapters in, the compass has been set into a helipad, fitted to a spare tire cover, echoed in stone on the sea floor and, at Monza, burned into the track in rubber.