World Wide Web
May 2nd, 2024
Now this is something cool that I came across while hunting for 90’s era Stone Island knitwear on Mercari and Yahoo Japan. Amongst the Stoney, I saw a listing for a jacket from a brand called World Wide Web. The price - 400,000 Yen. Needless to say I was intrigued.
After some deep diving, I found out that World Wide Web was actually a short-lived sub label under Stone Island’s parent company: SPW Company. Following Osti’s exit in 1995 from the label, SPW approached Osti’s second-in-commands: Lorenzino Piazzi and Paul Harvey to run Stone Island. Piazzi declined as he thought that would be the equivalent of spitting in the face of the man who taught him everything - Harvey however, accepted.
This is how World Wide Web was born. Piazzi at the time was lusting for an outlet to develop his own experimental ideas and SPW granted him with an opportunity.
World Wide Web’s collection stuck true to Stone Island’s ethos of innovative material development, thorough research, and new assembly techniques. Think military inspired fabrics that mask the wearer’s heat signature or early development of Stone Island’s signature thermo-reactive pieces.
However, what differentiated the two was the way the clothing and accessories in World Wide Web’s collections were distributed to customers. This was truly a sign of the times - and a clear illustration of the era. At the time, e-commerce (and the Internet in general) were nascent but ripe for exploration. How daunting and intimidating it must have been to toy with a pre-pubescent form of the Internet.
A proposal was drafted and a partnership with Harley Davidson was penned. At the time, Harley had around 1300 physical retail stores worldwide - a perfect market entry point to introduce the world to WWW. These 1300 or so stores would allow customers to try on and experience the WWW collection, and if they decided to cop up, they would do so on computers set up in the store. The computers were provided by none other than HP (the printer people), DHL was on the logistics front and VISA the preferred method of payment. This all sounds so foreign to me - and to think it was only 30-ish years ago.
Right when things were about to roll out - a huge restructuring occurred within SPW, 50/60 people were dismissed and a good chunk of those people were involved in the WWW project.
Fast forward to 2024 - the pieces from WWW are highly collectible items that fetch high sums of money. The rare sample, the few that were ordered through other means, friends and employees of SPW… I would imagine Jason Statham would have a few pieces of WWW in his wardrobe.
Image sources: Bonovista, Tumblr