Loro Piana is amongst the apex brands of Italian fabrication; its wool, cashmere, vicuna, and camel are reference point materials across the luxury industry in Italy and beyond. Added to that, innovative and functional treatments like its Storm System weatherproofing are widely incorporated by other houses into their designs: I cherish my K-way remix of a traditional Milanese loden executed in Storm System materials.
Yet while Loro Piana is highly recognizable to the touch, its visual identity is less defined. That’s why under recently-ish appointed CEO Damien Bertrand, the house is working to make its products look as distinct as they feel. Although you’ll have to skip between the menswear lookbook and the womenswear lookbook to take it in on Runway, in the showroom space the evidence of this initiative was clear. This was the first time menswear and womenswear were shown simultaneously since LVMH acquired the house from its family founders a decade ago, and you could see that both design teams had consulted on color palette, fabrication, and silhouette in order to craft a more coherent offer.
The respective design team leaders, who fly below the line according to company policy, offered that their shared inspirations this season were the tributary countries from which LP’s often vertically integrated supply chain begins. These are Peru, Bolivia and Argentina (for vicuna) , New Zealand and Australia (for wool) and Mongolia (for cashmere). These inspirations were gently applied in pattern and tone to two collections that worked hard to get along: adapted outerwear pieces from Loro’s more traditionally mannish canon were adapted for womenswear, while the pleated, fuller pants shape that the women’s team majored on was reflected in multiple menswear looks. The collections countered each other nicely, and looked good.
Sensation wise, however, it was hard to compete with the bales of unspun cashmere that were on offer—and available to touch—in an upstairs room: to this skin, the feeling of it was almost semi-tangibly gentle, like touching something that was neither gas, liquid nor solid. Loro Piana is an inherently discreet brand that is traditionally more progressive in its technical development than its expression. This collection pointed to the shaping of a more coherent voice with which to declare its excellence.
