All fashion is not luxury, and all luxury is not fashion. The two types of consumption are so often mixed together, like two carriages of a train, that sometimes it seems worth relaxing.
Loro Piana presents on the Milan Fashion Week calendar, so it is partially linked to the fashion train. However, really, it is a luxury house that creates collections in line with the seasonal rhythms of fashion but whose main appeal lies in the expert style. Its proprietary textile fabrications include Royal Lightness (an ultra-fine wool/silk blend) and King’s Gift (an ultra-fine merino). Likewise, his collections often draw on a very interesting cross-cultural mélange of perceived nobility that is occasionally embellished with a dash of culture, but which makes you understand very little about fashion.
This season’s presentation revolved around the concept of a cross-continental train journey with influences from Normandy to Persia. In a way it was a return trip: if the presentation was set on a luxury train, the train was decked out in many scarves, shawls and dresses in the ancient, Persian-origin paisley that has been part of Loro Piana’s catalog since the 1970s. A shawl lady’s full-sleeve shirt and pleated skirt look cut in a really pretty red wool/silk jacquard fabric, and came with a matching bag. At the front of the presentation was a fully skirted and beaded tonal paisley jacquard silk dress with a shirling jerkin insert with low suede shoes and a vaguely Central Asian cylindrical felt hat. To the right of the look was a mannequin dressed in a loose-fitting coat, comfortable trousers, more shoes, grosgrain-ribboned paisley-cut slippers, and a wide dupatta scarf covering the head beneath another brim of a felt hat.
These looks shared a costume sense that was more romantic than folkloric: very Julie Christie in them. Doctor Zhivago. This sense of imaginary travelers continued in an ocher-orange coat with a collar embroidered in wool after a cashmere shawl, its paisley dancing in claret, teal, ivory and saffron. The collection was meant to touch upon regional textile traditions and architecture without lingering long enough to become overly literal.
The Luro Piana Express also took on plenty of Mitteleuropean flavours, most forcefully in its Tirol-touched country outerwear for men and women: it looked appealing. Tailoring was casual, typically nostalgic, and broadly mid-century. The last stop seemed to be Paris and its hinterlands, as evidenced by the shawl-collared chenille cashmere/wool weave seemingly inspired by the traditional insulation of Norman Fisherfolk.
Despite the recent fashion claim to so-called quiet luxury that has been widely applied to it, Loro Piana is not really a fashion brand. It is a prestige textile house that develops the concept of inherited or even better, inherent taste that can be applied in many different regions. This collection did just that.
