Inside the Rise of Luxury Sound in Luxury Fashion

17 Mar 2026

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.