The recently relocated Stone Island boutique in New York City gleams with cool metal surfaces offset by dark concrete and blasted sand. Embedded LED screens project the brand’s ad campaigns and videos of dyeing processes. Custom leather-and-steel furniture invites you to sit and browse the brand’s books. But the store’s coolest feature is hidden in an intimate room on the lower level in the back of the shop, where a DJ setup includes custom speakers designed by the London hi-fi engineering outfit Friendly Pressure — the same brand that built Studio One, Stone Island’s custom listening station that has traveled around the world.
“The shape and materials for the store drove the design of the speakers,” says Shivas Brown, the founder of Friendly Pressure. “The idea was to have a conversation between the speakers and the rest of the store.”
This is just one luxe in-store listening experience of many. At the flagship of the Korean brand Post Archive Faction in Seoul, the most prominent feature is a speaker wall built by Evening Audio. The a.PRESSE shop in Tokyo features a pair of JBL Sovereign speakers — an artifact from the 1970s, widely considered to be the golden age of sound engineering — pumping out the softly enveloping sound that’s characteristic of audio gear of that era.
This past summer, the Valentino boutique on Madison Avenue touted a listening room, L’Atelier Sonore. And last year, Hermès offered a leather-wrapped DJ console complete with two Japan-manufactured turntables, designed in collaboration with the British DJ Prince Charles, following up with a pair of headphones that went viral due to their $15,000 price tag.
Across the global retail landscape, we increasingly experience luxury sound in luxury spaces. Over the past year, it seems like every other brand has rushed to show off their listening rooms and custom high-end audio systems. “Music always leads fashion. It’s what breaks cultural and political ideas,” Brown says. “Musicians with a voice are the ones whose silhouettes la mode follows.” And with hi-fi being one of the highest expressions of musical culture, it seems natural that fashion brands are tuning in.
If there is a trailblazer in fashion’s relationship to sound, it’s probably Devon Turnbull, who was already into sound equipment before he co-founded cult NYC store Nom de Guerre in 2003. While he was developing the shop’s clothing line, Tokyo became Turnbull’s second home. There, he immersed himself in Japanese stereophile culture and its DIY spirit. The country’s obsession with vintage hi-fi is obvious, from its myriad listening bars to its obscure vinyl shops.
When Undercover opened its Aoyama flagship in 2009, Jun Takahashi, who was just coming off showing a Dieter Rams-inspired collection at Pitti Uomo, installed a Braun sound system in its basement floor. Takahashi’s own office in Harajuku sports a pair of massive Altec Lansing A5 speakers, driven by an Altec 1568A amp with a Garrard 401 turntable. “DIY is the craft of audiophilia in a lot of ways in Japan,” Turnbull says. “Pretty much anyone who’s a serious audiophile will have things they've modified or built for themselves in their listening room.”
After Nom de Guerre shut down in 2010, Turnbull decided to devote himself to making sound equipment full time, founding his own brand, OJAS. Few understood his obsession. “At the time, people in the fashion world had no interest in audio as art and craft,” he says.
Things began to change when, in 2017, Supreme commissioned him to build speakers for its new Brooklyn outpost. Around the same time, Virgil Abloh began buying OJAS equipment, telling Turnbull that he viewed his work as art. As if to prove it, Abloh included a pair of Turnbull’s speakers into his 2019 museum exhibition “Figures of Speech” at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Abloh was a master of recontextualization. If he said that speakers were art, then they were.
The Tokyo branch of Union, which opened in 2018, also features a pair of Altec Lansing loudspeakers driven by a McIntosh amp — the same setup as its original Los Angeles location. “I wouldn’t call myself an audiofile by any stretch of the imagination, but music has been a huge part of my life since I was born,” says owner Chris Gibbs. “My dad is a musician so I grew up with music around me. I was an aspiring DJ/producer in high school and university but eventually pivoted to fashion.” For him, connecting style and stereo was a no-brainer.
As fashion’s fixation with culture has ratcheted up in the past couple of years, hi-fi suddenly seemed to be everywhere, from listening rooms in stores to runway props. “Now it’s all changed,” Turnbull says. “Now it’s like, I don’t know if there’s a single fashion brand that doesn’t have some kind of audio component.”
The latest nod to Turnbull’s work came from Louis Vuitton. In January, according to Turnbull, Pharrell used his system design as part of a transparent house that was the set for his men's fall/winter 2026 show. And just this month, Celine commissioned Paris designer Matéo Garcia to build a custom sound system for its runway.
It’s likely that that fashion’s hi-fi obsession is just a fad. Still, once the current wave of hype dissipates, there will be plenty of true stereo enthusiasts left.
