Inside Loro Piana’s Bold, Beautiful Museum Exhibition in Shanghai

Shanghai is not the first place you might think of for the 100th birthday celebrations of an Italian luxury house, but there’s method in it. At the Museum of Art Pudong, a multi-media exhibit—the first exhibition ever mounted by Loro Piana—opened last month and runs until May 5.

The show, entitled If You Know, You Know: Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence, is devoted to the hundred-year history of one of Italy’s best known (and yet least understood) luxury brands. If it’s misunderstood that’s largely because Loro Piana’s roots lie not in fashion, where it is a relative newcomer, but in the raw materials in their natural state: attached at one end to cashmere goats, vicuna, or merino sheep. Loro Piana is the OG of luxury, an unrivalled expert in going—literally—to the ends of the earth to nab the very best of these natural fibers for its own production and, for much of its history, all the best makers in fashion and luxury.

The view from outside.

For a centennial, there is little that is particularly retrospective about If You Know, You Know. The long evolution of Loro Piana from its foundations in 1924 as a spinner of wool yarns to a 21st century global synonym for luxury is instead marked out in a series of rooms that blend past and present, art and industry, but always with mother nature and its rather wonderful raw materials, like an endlessly recapitulated rondo, at its center.

There is a vast and ancient cast iron contraption from the earliest years of the house, shipped from Quarona, the brand’s home base in the foothills of the Alps, an hour and change northwest of Milan. This is a combing machine, mounted with hundreds of natural teazels—or thistle heads—and used to align and “tease” out raw wool bales prior to spinning into yarns. Even in industrialization nature is never far away.

Inside the exhibition.

But the combing machine is surrounded in the show by arresting, one-off fashion looks. Not one of them, as of now, will be available to customers. These were created by the show’s curator Judith Clark, who worked with Loro Piana’s design team to create 33 new men’s and women’s outfits from a variety of different natural fibers (though cashmere naturally enough dominates here). These pieces, spread throughout the show give life to—and underline the vital importance of—the raw materials to Loro Piana, to fashion, and to us too. The outfits run from exaggerated, couture-like silhouettes to luxurious casual looks to showcase the brand’s virtuosity with its ongoing raison d’être: the pursuit of excellence in all those natural fibers.

The Shanghai opening was also, conveniently, the opportunity for Loro Piana to celebrate the most vital cogs in the long supply chain that leads from baby goat to customer. These are the suppliers, cashmere goat farmers from mud brick houses on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia, China, where baby cashmere (the finest softest cashmere available) is harvested—just once—in the first year of a cashmere goat’s life. The awards given to the best growers, flown in from their remote farmsteads to bustling Shanghai, are recognition of the efforts, through breeding and rearing each new generation of goats, to create ever finer cashmere fibers.

Yes, that’s a very large pile of cashmere.

As the leading source of raw cashmere, China has been an integral part of Loro Piana’s operations since the late 1980s, when Pier Luigi Loro Piana set out to boldy go where—back then at least—no one had been, and establish more intimate ties with cashmere growers on their home turf. That 40-year investment of time, effort, and money is paying dividends now as new generations twig to the real meaning of luxury.