Why Loro Piana, the Italian Hyper

Sep 20, 2023

By Samuel Hine

Photography by Nicky Zeng

At Friday’s Loro Piana presentation in the center of Milan, a stand of mannequins comprised what was informally referred to as the Succession section, a nod to one reason why the 99-year-old uber-luxury brand is currently having a surprising moment of hype. When the show returns to the airwaves for its fourth and final season next month, Jeremy Strong, who plays the billionaire scion anti-hero Kendall Roy, will likely be wearing a custom Loro Piana jacket the brand sent him at the actor’s request. (As reported by GQ’s Gabriella Paiella in her Jeremy Strong cover story—my kind of scoop!)

Strong, as Paiella writes, is obsessed with nailing the details of Kendall’s wardrobe, and so of course he is obsessed with Loro Piana, which is like Uniqlo for billionaires. Loro Piana’s pillowy baby cashmere sweaters cost over $1,900; an unassuming black car coat costs $25,000. It’s the brand for any scion worth their inheritance, thanks to Loro’s almost fanatical devotion to sourcing the scarcest natural fibers on planet earth. Its priciest pieces are made with wool from the vicuña, a camelid species native to the Andes whose famously fine hair can only be shorn once every two years, and which the Loro Piana family helped save from near extinction. It’s this approach that puts Loro in a category of luxury all its own, one based on a tactility that the wearer and connoisseur can appreciate, and that—crucially—outsiders don’t recognize. This kind of “stealth wealth” dressing has long been preferred by smart money and, more recently, emulated by the Succession wardrobe department.

But if Loro Piana has been primarily known as a brand of elite basics, where the .01% would go to pick up the vicuña-lined building blocks of their walk-in-closet wardrobes, Loro is now making a strong case that should be taken seriously as a proper steward of style. Hence the Milan Fashion Week presentation, the first time the brand has ever showcased its men’s and women’s collections together. In the Succession section, two mannequins looked like alter-egos of Kendall, whose Loro-heavy fits are dissected on dedicated Instagram accounts that occasionally plug Loro’s $1,000 white-soled Summer Walk loafers, a rare bargain piece that not coincidentally has spread far from Fifth Ave.

One outfit, a navy chalk stripe suit in a handsome virgin wool cashmere blend, channeled boardroom Kendall. Until recently, the irony of Loro Piana was that while the woolen mill arm of the company manufactures fabrics for many of the most expensive tailoring brands on the planet, Loro Piana the clothing brand didn’t make a ton of suits. (On a visit to a Loro Piana fabric factory outside Milan earlier this week, I spotted bolts of monogrammed blankets and suiting fabrics awaiting finishing for several of Loro’s so-called competitors, and felt as though I had stumbled upon the center of the luxury matrix.) But if Loro Piana used to be for people so rich they had long abandoned their ties, these days the aspiring titans of the world understand the power of a beautiful piece of tailored clothing. This one had a youthful stance, with a narrow lapel, padded shoulder, and a squared-off, shortened shape, much more contemporary and considered than the too-slim suits worn by young professionals with more ambition than taste.

Another outfit, a navy overshirt with a pleasantly rounded collar and matching trousers, felt more like off-duty Kendall, complete with cashmere ball cap. These days, enlightened rich guys don’t want to parade around in linen shirts and white jeans like the hapless characters that populate The White Lotus. Instead, they want to sneak through the side entrance in their monochromatic fits, and they want to be unbelievably comfortable while doing so. Which, of course, is where Loro’s expertise comes in. The navy set was made from a type of proprietary Loro Piana merino wool the brand refers to as “The Gift of Kings,” a crease-resistant and breathable fabric sourced from sheep with regal and extraordinarily fine pelts. (The names of these materials alone inspire awe and wonder: The Gift of Kings!) For an outfit that will have an eye-watering price tag, it is highly, almost infuriatingly tasteful, and touching it created a strange sensory dissonance. It looks like a wool shirt jacket, and feels like a baby chinchilla. It is, somehow, waterproof.

The rest of the collection similarly spoke to this strange menswear moment we’re in, where outward flexing is frowned upon but inner pleasure is sacrosanct, where guys buy the things Kendall Roy wears and Lydia Tár represents a north star of poise and taste. (What does it say that our biggest icons of stealth wealth are fictional? Maybe that these clothes are too expensive for real people.) One handsome gray herringbone blazer with a subtle red over stripe was styled with deep blue CashDenim jeans, which are made with a denim-cashmere blend specially developed by Loro Piana in Japan, and which are as comfortable as they sound. A cashmere and wool hand-knit sweater in a milky hue, meanwhile, was a worthy follow-up to a lime green Loro turtleneck that, when worn by Christian Bale in GQ last October, made me question my own sanity. Why was I suddenly doing back-of-the-envelope math on how I could resolve upcoming rent payments with my unseemly desire for a $3,250 sweater?

After decades of preferring to fly under the radar, Loro Piana is starting to embrace being the surprisingly hot brand of the moment. In 2021, the brand collaborated with Japanese streetwear OG Hiroshi Fujiwara of FRGMT on a small capsule collection. And in an ad campaign earlier this month (until relatively recently, Loro Piana didn’t run advertisements or even have a marketing department), Loro Piana declared war on other labels copying the buttery Summer Walks. The slip-ons, once favored exclusively by master-of-the-universe types in Davos and Palm Beach, can now be spotted on guys like Fear Of God designer Jerry Lorenzo, in addition to family office wealth managers. The brash campaign leans all the way into the shoes’ elite associations: “Worn by those who do. Copied by those who don’t.”

It may be more wealth than stealth, but Loro’s new approach seems to be working. In New York during Fashion Week, I saw several people wearing Loro Piana’s $500 ballcaps. Of course, to its most devoted customers, Loro Piana is likely going to remain the ultra-luxe standby it has always been. Earlier this month, at the Gagosian gallery in New York, I spotted two gentlemen swaddled in Loro Piana. Upon closer inspection, it turned out they were gallerist Larry Gagosian and Bernard Arnault, the LVMH majordomo and world’s richest man, who liked wearing Loro Piana sweaters so much he bought 80% of the company in 2013 for $2.6 billion. Succession might be turning up Loro Piana’s cool factor for a new audience, but in real life, there’s a limit to how trendy a brand with such an elevated point of entry can be. And that’s presumably how Loro Piana’s devotees like it.

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