I met a man on the stairs the other day. He was leaving the pop-up as I was entering, and he stopped to tell me how much he enjoyed the website, as consistently generous and well-mannered PS readers often do. 

Then he said something that surprised me: he thanked us for covering Stone Island, which he had never considered before. Like many others, he had assumed it was a streetwear brand and as cheap and synthetic as the rest. 

But he’d visited, bought a raincoat, and was pleased with it. “There’s a lot in there, of course, and a lot of it isn’t for me,” he said. “But there are some real gems – once you know what you’re looking for.”

I don’t think he’ll mind me quoting him – PS readers are universally generous, as mentioned – and it stuck with me, because that was exactly the message I wanted to get across, to that type of person. 

Having explained the virtues of Stone Island a few months ago, and then Tony writing more on the history of the company, I thought it would be good today to focus on one piece I bought recently, and why it’s special. 

The piece is a cropped, black jacket redolent of denim jackets, or more closely, old M43 HBTs with their big chest pockets. 

It’s made of linen, but the linen is bonded to a lightweight jersey on the back in order to give it more structure. It means you get the firm shape of a denim jacket (and less wrinkling) but the coolness of linen. 

I tried a lot of things on in the Stone Island shop when I visited a month or so ago – mostly in the Ghost and Marina lines – and this jacket was the one that stuck out, because it typified the kind of fabric innovation Stone Island is good for. 

There are pure linen and pure cotton versions of this kind of jacket. Blackhorse Lane does a great Type II denim jacket in linen; and over at Clutch Cafe, they’ve got Full Count jackets in some new canvas colours, alongside the usual blue and black denim. 

But linen will always crease, and cotton will never be as cool. With the SI version in some ways you get the best of both worlds – and no one in the classic-menswear world is going to do that kind of bonded material. 

The jacket is also double dyed, in a process they often use on cotton and linen that produces distinctive dark colours; and then garment washed, giving it some nice fading. 

These dyeing processes are not something that makes the jacket necessarily better than a regular linen, but it does make it distinctive – something else that a reader might particularly like about Stone Island. 

There are also a few other nice design details, such as a hidden internal pocket on the left side (shown below) that’s so subtle it’s easy to miss.

The jacket is expensive even for Stone Island at £1,180 – a price that’s probably more than double what a PS reader would usually spend on such item.

Some of that is down to the technical aspects of the jacket mentioned above. Some of it is down to the fact SI is a bigger brand with shops and advertising. And some of it is down to the frequency of collections, which is an interesting topic we haven’t really covered much on Permanent Style. 

Most of the time, we dislike brands that change everything every six months. It means you can’t go back and buy the same thing in a different colour a year later, or indeed replace something five years later. 

But the flip side is the volume of new, interesting ideas. New designs, but also fabrics and cuts and colours. Not great for assembling the building blocks of a wardrobe, but enjoyable and fascinating. 

When you start exploring designer brands like this, you begin to understand why someone might talk about following the work of a particular designer, and buying into collections as they’re released if something particularly speaks to them. 

They identify with that creative mind, follow it on its journey, and mark the experience with pieces from particular points in time. To me it makes particular sense with someone like Stone Island, given so much is built around innovation. 

This is a very different way of shopping to the one we normally discuss, but once you have a lot of your normal wardrobe filled out, it can be both interesting and stimulating. 

And of course it also helps with the price if you only buy occasionally. 

Since first covering Stone Island last year, I’ve picked up one or two other new pieces, and a vintage piece from a friend – a cord popover from back in 1992. 

I’ve started to appreciate in the wearing what I previously only really saw at a distance, and it’s reinforced what I wrote about in that first article: the quality, the natural materials, the fact that every collection has something interesting (even if it’s only one thing). 

I can also navigate the brand better, knowing that the Marina collection for example – being the most traditional – is the most likely to have pieces that appeal. After that I look at the Ghost collection, which is less traditional, more urban. And I really only look at the mainline for technical things (such as a rain jacket).

Stone Island has become one of a small number of designer brands I regularly check for occasional, beautiful pieces, alongside the likes of Hermes and Loro Piana. And the prices always seem reasonable after visiting that last one. 

Coach jacket with anti-drop, size medium, shown with vintage US Army fatigues, a black Rubato knitted T-shirt and EB Meyrowitz ‘Californian’ sunglasses.