In 1983, Italian pop group Ricchi e Poveri stepped onto a glitzy television stage wearing what would become one of the most revered, mythologised, and misappropriated labels in men’s fashion: Stone Island. At the time, the brand was less than a year old, born out of the creative mind of Massimo Osti, as a vehicle for technical experimentation with fabrics and dyes. Like the pop trio who wore it, Stone Island was almost unknown outside of its native nation, and back then, even the majority of Italians had little awareness of that cool compass patch.
Ricchi e Poveri – Italian for “rich and poor” – were not known as fashion radicals. Their songs were syrupy, euphoric, and carefully tailored for Eurovision-style sensibilities. ABBA comparisons were common. But there they were, on terrestrial telly, wearing jackets bearing the now-iconic trademark mark on the left arm, nonchalantly, without irony, and far from connotations of tribal energy the logo would come to signify later in the decade and beyond. It was effortless. It was unstudied. And, in retrospect, it was unintentionally pioneering.
If you’re reading from an English-speaking nation, you probably won’t have encountered Ricchi e Poveri, though if you have it will almost certainly have been via their memorable, annoyingly catchy 1981 hit Sara Perché Ti Amo. Today, it echoes through football stadiums across Europe via a slightly edited version, sung with gusto in a way only European fans can execute. What began as a pure slice of Italo-pop is now a terrace anthem that appears to have been popularised by followers of AC Milan. It has since popped up in other places, particularly the rest of Italy and Spain. That transformation from romantic disco ballad to battle cry of the terraces mirrors another evolution: Stone Island’s journey from the catwalks of Italy to the floodlights of British football culture. Somewhat strangely, Ricchi e Poveri were at the heart of both.
Franco Gatti, the group’s moustachioed member, wears a dark jacket with a Stone Island patch barely peeking out from under the sleeve. The camera cuts away before it can land on it for too long, after all, in 1983, no one knew to look for it. Stone Island had only launched its first collection months earlier, made from Tela Stella, a fabric designed for military tarpaulins, garment-dyed in hues that defied categorisation. Yet here were Ricchi e Poveri, anodyne pop stars by most measures, adopting it with casual fluency. Their decision to wear Stone Island wasn’t about status or subculture. It wasn’t about flexing as many of the music stars of today have a tendency to do. It was, in the purest sense, about looking good in something new. They wore it because it fit the moment. They weren’t fashion pioneers on purpose, and apart from some vaguely Paninaro moments in the mid 80’s, their stage wear was mostly a case of dressing up in a glitzy, more formal manner. But this was Italy in the early ’80s, undergoing something of a cultural renaissance, where design, music, and fashion flowed seamlessly together.
There are UK-based lads out there with a few more miles on the clock than me, who will recount first-hand experience of seeing Stone Island in the late 80s. There are even some who claim to have visited Italy and become aware of it before the masses, which is fanciful at best.
That said, the relatively recent emergence of a rare shot of Haircut 100 singer Nick Hayward casually wearing a jacket to fail his driving test in 1982 shows it found its way to these shores. And the shots of Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon around the same time have been doing the rounds for a good while already. Perhaps these came as a result of Massimo Osti reaching out to the music artists of the day. Certainly, his earlier work via C.P. Company found favour with the largely left wing, anti-establishment creative crowd in his native Bologna a few years earlier. When we recently interviewed his son Lorenzo for the forthcoming 49th issue of our magazine, he told us how his father ensured the musicians he respected the most were wearing his clothes, particularly Lucio Dalla. Osti and Dalla were both natives of Bologna, and through their friendship, Dalla wore a specially designed jacket for his popular 1979 tour with Francesco De Gregori, playing live their collaborative album entitled Banana Republic.
What can be agreed upon pretty much universally is despite some notable early-adopters, the popularity of Osti brands in the UK was largely down to football supporters. British youth culture has always had a propensity to dress beyond its social station, right back to the gangs of Victorian times, through the birth of Mod, taking in tennis and golfwear along the way, and in doing so popularising sportswear as something you may not always be playing sport in. Dressing like a tennis player on day release from borstal was the prevailing look for many in the early 80s, and while there were a few forays down sartorial cul-de-sacs, the look that became crystalised as ‘casual’ by the end of the 1990s almost always included Stone Island or C.P. Company. In the previous decade, football was changing with the injection of TV revenue, though the archetypal fan was still someone who actively attended matches (as opposed to only watching on TV) and probably wasn’t as wealthy as their expensive Italian designer clothing might suggest. Looking rich while being poor. Ricchi e Poveri indeed.
There are plenty of examples down the years of people in the public eye becoming an unlikely style icon, but few can lay as strong a claim as Ricchi e Poveri. They’ve been the accidental architects of cool. They didn’t invent Stone Island. They didn’t intend for Sara Perché Ti Amo to be repurposed as a football chant. But they were, somehow, always a few steps ahead of the curve.
The adoption of their music by football fans only deepens the connection Sara Perché Ti Amo has all the ingredients of a perfect chant: it’s repetitive, euphoric, and shamelessly loud. When sung en masse, it becomes something greater than the sum of its parts. Communal, defiant, almost spiritual and almost universally appreciated. It shouldn’t be a surprise that if found a home on the terraces, and a second life with a younger generation, whose musical tastes are inspired by TikTok. The song is instantly memorable and very algorithm-friendly.
In a world where subcultures are mined and monetised faster than ever, Ricchi e Poveri’s moment in 1983 stands out as something refreshingly unselfconscious. In recent years, the masculine, predominantly terrace reputation of Stone Island has been somewhat diversified. This is clearly down to influential music artists of today wearing it in a much more measured, calculated way. But back in 1983 a mainstream Italian trio were already on it. They weren’t trying to be early adopters. They weren’t chasing clout. They simply wore what looked good to them and sang what felt right.
