All That Cashmere! The Secret to 100 Years of Loro Piana
Of course you know the saying: “Money talks. Wealth whispers.” Here’s what that sounds like. It’s a weekday afternoon at the Loro Piana boutique on Madison Avenue in New York City, and there is music playing—a faraway tinkle of Italian pop—but amid the white floral bouquets and low-slung cream sofas where well-preserved men with lush thickets of hair are trying on slip-ons and piles of sweaters, the atmosphere is hushed.
Founded a century ago, long before the notion of quiet luxury filtered down to mainstream fashion, Loro Piana is today a redoubt of refinement. It has 171 stores around the world, each catering to potentates of every imaginable stripe, from standard-bearing power brokers like Bill Gates to next-gen fictional machers like Succession’s Kendall Roy, fan of the Savile cashmere-blend overcoat ($8,895).
“If you know, you know,” says Loro Piana chief executive Damien Bertrand, formerly managing director of Christian Dior Couture. “It goes beyond fashions, logos, and seasonality.” Captains of industry patronize Loro Piana not just to telegraph that they’re above trends but to project what they do care about.
“Trends whip through banks. Like, everyone purchases the same Cartier watch and Ferragamo tiny print tie,” says Jessica Cadmus, a stylist at Wardrobe Whisperer who specializes in dressing C-suite executives and partners (she takes clients only by referral). “Loro Piana is a much quieter brand. It’s for people who are senior who want to look current but don’t want to be loud.”
What really distinguishes Loro Piana is a vertically integrated production chain that sees design, fabrication, and assembly all controlled in-house. What master of the universe wouldn’t admire that level of transparent accountability, not to mention technical know-how? Pietro Loro Piana started the company to sell textiles in 1924 (the family had been in the fabric trade since 1812), and the company would scour the globe for raw materials, bringing cashmere back from Mongolia in the 1980s and procuring lotus flowers for linens from Myanmar.
By the early 1990s, when it was the sotto voce supplier of extremely fine fabrics to some of the world’s most elite labels, Loro introduced its own clothing line and, more crucially, began buying an animal fiber that became synonymous with rarefied quality: vicuña, which it handled exclusively for a decade thanks to a unique contract with the government of Peru. You know what can’t be replicated by artificial intelligence? The $25,000 privilege of coats made from the most expensive wool in the world. Bernard Arnault, who had been paying close attention, took an 80 percent stake in the company in 2013 for 2 billion euros.
As a matter of fact, Loro Piana calls five of those signature men’s coats “Icons,” and it has begun bringing the Duster, the Traveller, the Horsey, and the Windmate to market, redesigned for women, starting this spring with the Spagna, which was created in 1998 and was inspired by Spanish officer uniforms.
Traveller Jacket
loropiana.com
$2675.00
“Mr. Loro Piana had a lot of them in his wardrobe,” says Alessandra Varianini, Product development & collection merchandising director, who is based in Milan. Form, utility, and discretion are bedrock principles, not just mood board pins. Before any kind of logo is put on anything, Varianini says, there’s a whole discussion. “Should we do this? Even if it’s very small. A lot of the details are hidden on the inside, like the lining of a secret pocket is cashmere.”
While Loro does a bustling business dressing the Gulfstream-and-Benetti elite with outerwear like the Originals, as well as custom interiors and furnishings for their off-duty toys, what may account for its increased profile of late is its favor with such discerning aesthetes as Gwyneth Paltrow, who was thought to have worn a cream Loro turtleneck to her ski crash trial.
“Loro is completely removed from the exhausting convergence of aspiration and luxury,” says Daniel Emilio Soares, founder of the status produce purveyor Alimentari Flaneur. “There is no aspiration needed to convince people that Loro Piana is a genuine expression of Italian luxury. The quality speaks for itself.”
But it’s thanks to Succession that Loro has found itself, a hundred years on, discovered by a nouveau riche clientele more interested in registering its arrival than in sartorial discretion, which it usually does with entry-level items like $1,000 white sole Summer Walk loafers and $525 tone-on-tone cashmere baseball caps.
“Loro Piana has become, through Succession and the internet, a status symbol,” says James Harris, co-host of the menswear-obsessed Throwing Fits podcast. “And status symbols are gauche. You’re playing dress-up as you imagine rich people dress.” Cadmus keeps her clients far away from the hats. “Oh god,” she says. “So not on brand.”
Not that anyone is turning away any business. During Milan Fashion Week and the annual Salone del Mobile fair, the Loro Piana boutiques are buzzing with lookie-loos, and the brand’s formerly low-key appointments with buyers, who go out of their way to praise Loro, are now as hot a ticket as Supreme drops.
Tracy Margolies, chief merchandising officer at Saks Fifth Avenue, mentions that the younger generation of Loro fans are flocking to it because of the internet, “driven by the influence,” she says, “of the Gstaad Guy.” That would be a TikTok and Instagram satire of an old-money guy who speaks in franglais (his catchphrase is “la poubelle” for trash). Loro is his passion, and he mentions it in more videos than not. One of his skits seems to summarize the brand’s ethos better than anything. “Wear functional sportswear or the best of the best. Loro Piana. No situationships. No business class compromises,” he intones. “We either stick to the basics or strive for excellence. Nothing in between.”
Back in Milan, Varianini hasn’t picked up on all the buzz from America. “I haven’t been following everything, and I don’t watch much TV,” she says. “It hasn’t affected us as a team or a company.” In other words, avanti. The less said the better.
This story appears in the March 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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