Not all fashion is luxury, and not all luxury is fashion. The two categories of consumables are so often coupled together, like two carriages of a train, that it seems sometimes worth restating.
Loro Piana presents on the calendar of Milan Fashion Week, so it’s partly coupled to the fashion train. Really, however, it is a luxury house that produces collections according to fashion’s seasonal rhythms but whose core appeal rests in the perception of connoisseurship. Its proprietary textile fabrications include Royal Lightness (an ultrafine wool-silk blend) and Gift of Kings (an ultra-ultra-fine merino). Similarly, its collections often hew toward a quite interesting cross-cultural mélange of perceived nobility that is occasionally seasoned with a dash of culture, but which rarely strikes you as being much about fashion.
This season’s presentation was staged around the notion of a cross-continent train journey whose influences ran from Normandy to Persia. In a way, this was a return journey: If the show was set on a luxury train, then that train was upholstered in the many scarves, shawls, and garments in the ancient Persian-origin paisley that has been part of Loro Piana’s catalog since the 1970s. One shawled women’s look of a full-sleeve shirt and pleated skirt was cut in a truly lovely red wool-silk jacquard fabric and came with a matching bag. At the front of the presentation, there was a full-skirted and belted tonal paisley jacquard silk dress with a shearling jerkin insert worn with ruched suede boots and a vaguely central Asian cylindrical felt hat. To that look’s right was a mannequin attired in a loose robe coat, relaxed trousers, more boots, grosgrain-ribboned paisley ikat slippers, and a wide draped scarf arranged as a head covering beneath another chimney of a felt hat.
These looks shared a sense of costume that was more romantic than folkloric: very Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago. This sense of imagined travelers continued in an ochre-orange tailored coat whose collar was embroidered in wool after a Kashmir shawl, its paisley a swirling dance of claret, teal, ivory, and saffron. The collection’s process was to touch upon regional textile traditions and architectures without ever stopping long enough to become overly literal.
The Loro Piana express also took in plenty of Mitteleuropa flavors, most compellingly in its Tirol-touched country outerwear for men and women: This tended to look delightful. Tailoring was comfortably loose, generally nostalgic, and broadly midcentury. The final stop seemed to be Paris and its hinterlands, as evinced in a shawl-collared chenille cashmere-wool knit that was inspired, apparently, by the traditional insulation of Norman fisherfolk.
Despite the recently asserted fashion for so-called quiet luxury that was so widely applied to it, Loro Piana isn’t truly a fashion brand. It is a prestige textile house that dresses an idea of inherited—or, even better, inherent—taste that can be applied across many different regions. This collection did that.
