Loro Piana

Superfine merino, cashmere and vicuña

The Loro Piana family were wool merchants long before they were weavers. Originally from Trivero, they traded woollen cloth from the early nineteenth century, then moved to the Valsesia and ran spinning mills there. In 1924 the engineer Pietro Loro Piana founded the house that still bears the name, at Quarona, in the foothills of the Italian Alps.

Its reputation rests on fibre most houses never handle. From the start it dealt in cashmere, vicuña, linen and merino, and the modern books still run that way, with superfine merino at the everyday end and cashmere and vicuña at the other. The finishing is the signature: the cloth is soft without being fragile, with a hand you notice the moment the bunch is opened.

For a tailor this is easy cloth to love and serious cloth to cut. Fine fibre forgives nothing, and the canvas work and the final press both show through it, so we take our time.

When a commission calls for the quietest kind of luxury, this is usually where the cloth comes from. Nothing about it shouts, which is rather the point. Ask to see the Loro Piana book at a fitting, and bring a decision you are happy to spend a little longer on.