Liam Gallagher is (finally) the official face of Stone Island

If you Google the words “Liam Gallagher” and “Stone Island”, roughly one and a half million results appear. Over the years, the younger Gallagher brother has proudly repped the brand, whether that be at music festivals, on magazine covers, or just having a nice wander down the street. And one subtly menacing tweet from 2017 – addressed to “the cunt who stole my stone island parkas from my hotel room” – suggested the lengths he might go to in order to protect his beloved coats. However, despite this well-documented love for the label, you might be surprised to find out that, of those one and a half million results, not a single one is an actual Stone Island campaign. That is, until this morning.

After launching its “Community as a form of research” campaign in January, Stone Island is back with a second instalment of the project, and the Oasis frontman is taking a starring role. British photographer David Sims is also back for the AW24 campaign, shooting Gallagher as an official inductee into the Stone Island ‘community’. Joining the Britpop star are musician and skateboarder Sage Elsesser, producer and DJ Peggy Gou and actor Russell Tovey, who are all shot in clothes from the label’s most recent collection. Contrastingly, Gallagher is the only campaign star wearing an archival piece – a sandy coloured, zip-up smock from the brand’s AW83-84 collection.

As the “research” part of the campaign suggests, each star is given a small questionnaire by art critic and Serpentine Gallery boss Hans Ulrich Obrist, which is printed alongside their photograph. In Gallagher’s one, he’s asked what his favourite season is (“football season”), what his favourite city is (“Manchester City, and Manchester the city”), and what he’s grateful for (“Everything. I fucking love being alive. It’s amazing”). Elsewhere, Obrist asked the musician if he prefers “classic or modern or both”, to which Gallagher replies, “all this new stuff doesn’t do it for me. It all stems from the past, which is classic.” (That explains the archive cagoule, then.)

Thanks to some clever suits in the Stone Island office, dropping this set of images now is expertly timed for maximum impact. Unless you’ve been living underneath a rock for the last week, you’ll know that Gallagher is back in the news after burying the hatchet with his older brother and nemesis Noel, getting the band back together for a set of stadium shows next summer. Despite accusations of price-gouging when the tickets went on sale, and rumours that the band’s return is actually a Labour government psy-op, die-hard fans were willing to fork out hundreds, and we’re sure seeing Liam finally bag a Stone Island campaign will get them all riled up for what’s to come.

Scroll through the gallery above to see the entire campaign