Loro Piana’s Debut Exhibition Champions Fiber Fetish, Exaggerated Fashion, and Breaks Museum’s No-Touch Rule

If You Know, You Know, or IYKYK — a catchphrase that embodies insider status — is how Loro Piana wants to be recognized in the world. The acronym also lends its name to the brand’s first exhibition in China, which will soon be unveiled at Shanghai‘s Museum of Art Pudong, a massive white box structure overlooking the storied Huangpu River.

The retrospective, which is part of the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned Italian luxury house’s centennial celebration, is a comprehensive and sensory-friendly experience that fans out across 1,000 square meters, telling the story of the brand’s family legacy, textile know-how, fashion prowess, its links to China, and its devotion to the art world in 15 galleries.

Titled “If You Know, You Know. Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence” — alternatively known as “One Hundred Years a Touch” in Chinese — the exhibition will be open to the public daily from March 22 to May 5.

This exhibition will mark the first time that MAP welcomes a luxury brand into its revered halls. Designed by the esteemed Parisian architecture firm Ateliers Jean Nouvel, the three-year-old cultural establishment’s first brush with the fashion world came last May with the staging of a Balenciaga runway show on its outdoor corridors.

For Damien Bertrand, chief executive officer of Loro Piana who will be moving over to become deputy CEO of Louis Vuitton, the exhibition is meant to bring the brand closer to its Chinese “connoisseur” and expand upon Loro Piana’s cultural narrative.

“Loro Piana conveys a sense of detail, a sense of quality, a sense of taking the time to do beautiful things. When you do an exhibition, you can stay five hours, or as long as you want — we really want people to take the time to understand what Loro Piana is. Thus the museum was perfect for us — it’s really about creating a cultural moment,” said Bertrand.

“Usually, in a museum, you can not really touch anything, but here, for the first time, you will be able to touch, to sense the Loro Piana quality,” added the ebullient executive.

In addition, Bertrand said the exhibition is meant to celebrate the brand’s historical relationship with China, where the company sources much of its “noble fiber.”

To wit, Loro Piana’s robust supply chain has integrated Inner Mongolian suppliers since the late 1980s. “We have a lab in Alashan where we develop the Loro Piana method; it’s really a place where we try to innovate for quality and sustainability,” Bertrand added.

The exhibition opening will also coincide with the ninth and 10th celebrations of the “Cashmere of the Year” award, which recognizes fiber producers of exceptional quality.

Over two years in the making, the Loro Piana exhibition was curated by British fashion curator Judith Clark.

“It was certainly part of the agreement that it would be not highlighting product, that it would be about process, that it would be about history, so I took that very seriously,” said Clark of her curatorial approach. “And then there’s the relationship with the archive, which meant going back to basics, just going in and listening to the archivist, listening to the designers, listening to the history of the company and looking at this arc of the 100 years and seeing how to tell that story in a way that is evocative and appealing to an audience,” she added.

The exhibition begins with a selection of artworks from Pinacoteca di Varallo, a museum close to the Loro Piana family estate at Valsesia, which depicts the natural setting and the lifestyle that informed the Loro Piana aesthetic.

At the center of the room is a textile scrim that gives the audience a preview of the show. “We wanted this double story to exist spatially within the exhibition,” said Clark. “People often call it the blue of distance in Renaissance paintings, similarly, the [exhibition space’s] blurred and softened distance is softened with a structure made of Loro Piana textile,” Clark explained.

Loro Piana’s conversation with fine art continues with Sergio and Luisa Loro Piana’s collection of midcentury artworks. As the brand’s sixth-generation heirs, they are drawn to experimental paintings that pay homage to Northern Italy’s rugged beauty — such as pieces from Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani, and Emilio Vedova.

Art, a key thread line in the exhibition, not only shows the Loro Piana family’s eclectic taste in art but offers a conceptual language that reminds visitors “that this language [of the house] is more porous than we think,” observed Clark.

“I’m not saying that dress is art — I’m saying, look at the relationship conceptually between the two,” she noted, referring to multiple moments in the show where pieces of artwork are in juxtaposition with 33 fashion silhouettes created especially for the retrospective. Intentional details, such as the mannequin’s woolen hair crafted by Angelo Seminara, add an air of whimsy to the otherwise wabi-sabi setting.

With artifacts such as fabric swatches, reference books and magazine clippings, the exhibition paints a colorful picture of how Sergio and Pier Luigi Loro Piana transformed the high-quality wool supplier into a prestigious luxury maison. Here, Clark also used compelling exhibition-making techniques to explore the fun side of Loro Piana. The mise-en-scene moment features mannequins, dry in their waterproof Loro Piana coats, playfully battling the elements as models did in 1990s advertisement campaigns; a toy boat and a furry dog, both recreated in white rubber, pays tribute to its now famous white sole summer shoe, teasing out another “IYKYK” moment in the exhibition.

To explain Loro Piana’s intricate yet robust supply chain, Clark created a white-tiled lab gallery to illustrate the surgical precision of the quality control process a mound of Baby Cashmere goes through. Under a magnifying glass, the fiber is blown up 35,000 times to inspect for any flaws or imperfections.

In the ensuing suite, dubbed “The Landscapes,” the story of Loro Piana’s unique fibers is recounted through miniature landscapes of China, the Andes, Japan, New Zealand, and France, representing the origin of its cashmere, vicuna, denim, Merino wool, and linen, respectively.

Ten exaggerated fashion silhouettes, which bring to life the multitudes of the fibers, are displayed next to the landscapes from which they were sourced.

Another balloon-shaped ballgown, which displays the use of several crochet techniques, is placed next to a braided textile wheel created by Sheila Hicks, the American fiber artist and sculptor.

For Clark, the idea was to bring to light parallel histories of feminist art and textile art, which were traditionally at the bottom of the art hierarchy.

“For me, it’s very important that those associations are made. To be able to exaggerate those skills within a space, I think it is fantastic,” said Clark.

The sense of touch and the idea of softness explodes in the following “Cocooning” room. With padded walls that resemble the inside out of a Loro Piana jacket, the space exhibits eight avant-garde pieces in natural hues that combine monastic refinement, theatrical play on volumes, and intricate handicrafts.

“We are reminded of the textile as the fetish object,” said Clark, pointing to a record bale displayed in the next room that’s dedicated to the making of The Gifts of Kings merino wool, Loro Piana’s signature fiber. Flanked by a Westworld-esque, retro-futuristic ball gown in Kummel red, the gleaming white bale feels almost humble in comparison — standing in the shadow as an artifact of quiet luxury.

Walking through a corridor padded with Cashfur walls, guests are introduced to the “Thistle” gallery, an important tool and motif throughout the brand’s history.

A monumental thistle machine, which is used to soften coarse fabrics, commands viewers’ full attention at the center of the gallery. It takes a minute for the audience to make the connection, but the floral emblem that lines the machine also morphed into artistic motifs that adorn the walls, the tiles and the bricks that line the room, which were intricately reimaged by the London-based artisan and master carver Jim Patrick.

Another focal point of the room is an egg-shaped cape. Whimsical yet opulent, the shell-like structure is adorned with 550 Baby Cashmere blooms and foliage crafted from Loro Piana’s classic Only Double cashmere.

A full-circle moment arrives with the final segment of the exhibition, where a landscape painting from Pinacoteca di Varallo is in direct dialogue with a monumental map painting by the Chinese contemporary artist Qiu Zhijie.

Wafting through the room is a soundscape that captures the textile-making process and the work-in-progress of the exhibition itself. Created by the Chinese artistic director Guo Wenjing, composer Liu Hao, bamboo flautist Tang Junqiao, and pianist Tim Zhang, the classical Chinese tunes triggers a sense of pastoral tranquility.

A miniature model of the Italian landscape stands at the center of the last gallery space. It is encircled by textile screens, which show snippets from the textile-making process and the work-in-progress of the exhibition itself. “It was about a kind of disorientation, it’s a kind of to and fro with Guo’s composition, where it starts with the bamboo flute, and then becomes the rhythm of Italy — a merging together of these two languages,” said Clark.

Concluding on a thoughtful yet tactile note, guests are gifted a small pouch filled with a sample of cashmere bale.

The exhibition, which has already been sold out for the first two days, is a testament to the appeal of Loro Piana, which has become the third-largest business in the fashion and leather goods division behind Louis Vuitton and Dior.

The luxury brand counts 41 doors in mainland China and has been doubling down on its clienteling business with the opening of its first VIC salon at Shanghai’s Plaza 66, where exclusive products, produced in “very, very small quantity,” are available, according to Bertrand.

For Bertrand, the luxury brand’s footprint in China will not change dramatically, but it will go where its community is.

“It could be tier one, it could be tier two, we think much more in the quality of the footprint, the quality of where we can find the clientele for Loro Piana,” he said.

“We are much more into a vision of less is more, less is better. This is true for China and the rest of the world,” Bertrand added.