If you’re uninitiated into the world of Stone Island, you’d be forgiven for missing the fact that it’s an Italian brand, given its English language name and its assimilation into British culture. “It’s got a name that doesn’t necessarily resonate as made in Italy, but in fact the part of Italy that it comes from is more associated with product design, industrial design, a lot of leading automotive global labels: Ferrari, Ducatti, Maserati come from this part of Italy,” says CEO Robert Triefus. Founded in 1982, the luxury menswear brand has its own industrial pedigree fitting of the region thanks to its long history of materials innovation – such that Jony Ive would apparently visit Stone Island with his R&D team at Apple to examine colour and dye processes.

This legacy is in part what made Stone Island attractive to Triefus, who took over the helm roughly a year ago after executive roles at Gucci, Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. Yet he was just as interested in the brand’s cultural footprint: “I’ve worked with brands all through my career, and I’ve rarely seen a brand that is so naturally adopted by communities rather than the brand going into communities and forcing itself onto them.”

These two halves of Stone Island provide the foundations of the brand’s new online experience, created in partnership with R/GA. Triefus, who joined midway through the exercise, was eager to move away from the “functional” and “transactional” nature of the previous site and reflect the brand’s technical and cultural sides, summed up as ‘lab’ and ‘life’ respectively.