Mind Your Business: Concepts x Stanley around the áTable

Once again we cleared the floor at Calle Fortuny 51, set a long table and invited our community to sit down for áTable, the dinner series where we celebrate the releases and the people that matter to us. For this edition we gathered around the Concepts x Stanley collaboration, a capsule that covers Stanley's most familiar drinkware in X-ray imagery, and we wanted the whole evening to feel as if we were looking straight through it.

To understand this capsule, you have to go back to 1996. That year Tarek Hassan opened Concepts in Harvard Square, in Cambridge, just outside Boston. It was one of the first shops to mix sneakers, skate, streetwear and fashion, at a time when those worlds still kept to themselves. In thirty years, the neighborhood shop has become a global reference. There's the three-floor flagship that opened in 2020 at 18 Newbury Street in Boston, designed like an art gallery. There are also stores in New York (99 University Place) and in Dubai on City Walk, opened in late 2016 as its first store outside the US. But Concepts made its name above all through collaborations. In 2008 came the Nike SB Dunk "Lobster", a nod to New England's lobsters. It became one of the most sought-after sneakers of its generation and came back in blue, yellow, purple, green and then orange. In 2013 there was the ASICS "Three Lies", limited to 800 pairs, followed by projects with New Balance, adidas, Birkenstock, Canada Goose and Versace. Every time, Concepts starts from an object everyone knows and slips a story into it.

Pairing Concepts with Stanley makes sense. Stanley began in 1913, when William Stanley Jr. patented the first all-steel vacuum bottle. Production started two years later in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the same state Concepts comes from. So these are two New England houses. One invented an object that has barely changed in a century. The other made reworking cult objects its signature. The X-rays follow naturally from that: instead of changing the bottle, Concepts invites us to look through it.

The table itself was a long light box glowing blue in a darkened room. Across its surface we laid oversized black letters spelling MIND YOUR BUSINESS over X-ray films of a skull, a ribcage, a hand and a frog, so that every guest sat in front of a different fragment of the message. Down the centre, the frosted Concepts x Stanley boxes let the light pass through them and revealed the silhouette of the bottle, flask or mug waiting inside.

The collection was displayed on concrete plinths in front of our sneaker wall. The Classic Legendary bottle carries the X-ray of a hand, the pocket flask hides a folding knife, and the mugs and tumbler show a frog, a bird and a coiled snake. Concepts has a talent for finding the story inside an everyday object, and it works here because Stanley's pieces remain exactly what they have always been, tough and dependable, with the graphics simply giving you a reason to look twice.

In the kitchen, Aprons & Kimonos took charge of the menu once more, and once more the food was what everyone was still talking about at the end of the night. They worked through starters, a main course and dessert from our open kitchen, opening with hand-cut steak tartare on crisp toast with a yolk cream, puffed rice and chives, served from steel camp pans that sat perfectly alongside the Stanley pieces. Drinks stayed cold on ice in a black Stanley cooler, which turned out to be one of the most photographed objects of the evening.

The guests did the rest. Drinks in the lounge under the mirrored ceiling turned into long conversations between friends of the store, creatives and people discovering NOIRFONCE for the first time, and by the time the lights dropped and the table came alive, the room already felt like a dinner among friends. An engraved áTable Stanley food jar waited at every place, and everyone went home with theirs in a Stanley x NOIRFONCE tote bag.

Thank you to Concepts and Stanley for trusting us with this release, to the Aprons & Kimonos team for a menu that matched the setting, and to Estrella Galicia for delighting us once again with their Rivera Reposada, which has become our new favourite beer. Finally, thank you to everyone who joined us and stayed late. The Concepts x Stanley collection is available now in store at Calle Fortuny 51 and online, and if you missed our previous dinner, you can read about it in Still Loyal, still around the (á)Table.