Loro Piana: Master of Fibres, a new coffee table book from Assouline’s Ultimate Collection, charts Loro Piana’s remarkable path to becoming the quiet luxury jewel in the LVMH triregnum that it is today. Published to coincide with the centennial of Italian entrepreneur Pietro Loro Piana founding a textile mill in a picturesque Piedmont valley where clear mountain streams were perfect for washing wool, it’s based on interviews with multiple generations of the Loro Piana family. Featuring color plates hand-tipped on art quality paper and a clamshell case covered in Loro Piana Tela Sergio fabric crafted from cotton and linen, the 196-page tome traverses the globe from the snowy peaks of the Andes to the sandy expanse of the Gobi Desert to unspool the story of the Italian powerhouse’s never-ending quest for unparalleled natural fibers.
The author, historian Nicholas Foulkes, is an expert on social history and material culture as well as a Loro Piana devotee. In the book’s introduction he likens the experience of purchasing his first Loro Piana quilted gilet a number of years ago at the Breakers in Palm Beach to having “undergone a conversion.” He’s now something of a cashmere evangelist. “Loro Piana has always been about touch—you can understand it when you feel it between your fingers,” says Foulkes. “The quality reveals itself over time. I have worn Loro Piana garments from 20 years ago and they remain exceptional. It is just like picking up and opening a book and returning to that book over the years. A solid thing.” The hand-bound volume is a testament to Loro Piana’s unrivaled savoir-faire—quite literally, as it clocks in at 20 pounds.
Since spring 2023 when Gwyneth Paltrow’s Park City ski trial, Sofia Richie Grainge’s Hôtel du Cap nuptials, and the final season of Succession began supplying the TikTok mill with fertile one-percenter grist that featured lots of unintentional Loro Piana product placements, the Quarona, Italy-based brand has become the unholy obsession of aspirational dressers everywhere. On social media you’ll find Gen Z’s paeans to such niche items as Summer Walk suede loafers with distinctive white soles (originally designed to leave no marks on wooden boat decks) and vicuña T-shirts made with the same soft and gossamer-light fiber spun from the fleece of a small mountain dwelling camelid once favored by Incan emperors. For the first time ever a Loro Piana product—a baseball cap like the one worn on TV by Kendall Roy—cracked the top 10 on Lyst’s Hottest Products list last year.
As Master of Fibres makes clear, being “hot” was never really part of the plan for Loro Piano. The house was perfectly content to fly under the radar. (Cheeky ads literally used the phrase now trending on TikTok, “if you know, you know.”) In fact, for much of its history, Loro Piana didn’t even make clothing: It supplied top quality wool and cashmere fabrics to European and American luxury labels including Giorgio Armani, Versace, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Donna Karan, and Ralph Lauren. That began to change in the 1980s, when the firm created its first wearable product, the fringed Grande Unita cashmere scarf available in 30 different hues.
Then, at the 1992 Olympics Loro Piana outfitted the Italian equestrian team with the Horsey, a jacket with a notched zip flap that allows it to fold gracefully when seated, and had a bonafide hit on its hands. “People were asking, ‘What can we put under the Horsey jacket?’” recalls Luisa Loro Piana in the text. “So we said, ‘Let’s produce some sweaters.’ Then people said, ‘We want some trousers. Can you suggest trousers that we can wear with the Horsey jacket?’” Thereafter the brand offered “solutions to be elegant and comfortable in Saint-Tropez, in Gstaad, in the Hamptons.”
Key to Loro Piana’s continued success is its legacy of material innovation and an ability to source the “rarest and most recondite fibers,” says Foulkes. In 1979, the mill transformed a lightweight worsted fabric originally used for clerical vestments into the stuff of luxury fashion by looking beyond the mountains of northern Italy to a sheep bred halfway around the world in Tasmania whose wool can be spun into a thread so fine that a single pound would stretch for 136 miles. Loro Piana’s “excellences” as the brand calls its most exalted fabrics have since grown to include vicuña form Peru (1994), the down-like fleece combed from baby goats in the Inner Mongolia region of China known as baby cashmere (2008), and Gift of Kings merino wool from Australia and New Zealand that at just 12 microns is less than one-fifth the diameter of a human hair (2015).
“First and foremost Loro Piana is derived from nature and processed like the finest champagne,” says deputy chairman Pier Luigi Loro Piana. In 2013, the same year LVMH acquired an 80 percent stake in Loro Piana, the house also began looking to renewable plant-based fiber sources, including a fabric woven in Myanmar from the stems of lotus flowers. Lotus plants are perennial and can be harvested multiple times in a year, making them a low environmental impact material, but the weaving process is labor intensive—a single jacket requires 6,500 stems—and the generations-old skill was endangered until Loro Piana began guaranteeing a steady demand for this artisanal craft. And through linen grown in France and Belgium, Loro Piana has also made a major investment in a sustainable fiber that requires less water and pesticides than other crops thanks to cultivation without irrigation. As brands have become increasingly aware of their carbon footprint, Loro Piana’s abstention from synthetic materials for a century seems nearly prophetic.
