Inside Loro Piana’s extraordinary first exhibition in Shanghai, celebrating a century of craft

‘Time is very important, you have to use it in the right way,’ Pier Luigi Loro Piana, the sixth-generation Loro Piana family member told a candlelit dining room at Shanghai’s Museum of Art Pudong on Thursday evening. Moments beforehand, he had welcomed guests to the opening of the landmark exhibition celebrating his family brand’s centenary, a retrospective that at its heart is about honouring the passage of time.

‘If You Know You Know: Loro Piana’s Quest For Excellence’ is the first exhibition that the luxury Italian house has staged in its 100-year history. Brought to life by the revered British curator Judith Clark, it is part commemorative of Loro Piana’s beginnings in 1924 as a luxury trader and supplier; part celebration of the relationship it has enjoyed with China’s community of goat-herders who have produced its exquisite cashmere fibres since the 1960s; and a wholly sensorial ode to its exquisite material innovation in the meantime.

‘If You Know, You Know: Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence’ in Shanghai

Initiating the project a little over a year ago, Clark’s first port of call was the Loro Piana archive in Varallo, situated in Piedmonte’s Valsesia Valley, which set the tone for the project.

‘When I was looking in the archive, there was always a sort of double message; there was one that was not only of lightness, because of course the fabric is light, but light-heartedness and so lightness felt key,’ she told Wallpaper* following a private tour of the space. ‘Then there was something about the striving for the lightness and the quest that came with it. Everything came with a superlative, but not in a grandiose way, [rather] in a literary and poetic way. It felt like a kind of allegorical tale and that stuck with me.’

Taking place over 1,000 sq m, three galleries, and 15 rooms, the exhibition – the first to be staged by a luxury fashion house at the MAP – commences by transporting guests to Varello through the colours of Giovanni Antonio de Groot’s oil painting loaned by the Pinacoteca di Varallo at eye level and replica sampietrini stone tiles from the gallery’s courtyard entrance underfoot.

Opposite, a whisper-thin screen of cashmere provides a glimpse into a later room of the exhibit immediately introducing the dialogue between past and present that the exhibit presents. To get there, visitors must travel through 15 rooms, each dedicated to a defining epoch in the Loro Piana story.

A room dedicated to the brand’s archive, comprising early advertisements and ink-coded fabric swatch books that could pass for sheet music (‘some of the most exquisite objects in the archive,’ says Clark), is followed by a flashback to the brand’s first forays into its all-weather outerwear under the style-savvy eye of Pier Luigi’s late brother Sergio, including its iconic Traveller, Roadster and Defender Jackets. Thereafter, Clark’s approach to ‘marrying innovation with museology’ comes to life by placing reflection and projection in constant conversation.

Two specific details that captured her attention on early research visits to Varello were the original cast-iron thistle machine that finesses the cashmere and the white-tiled laboratory where the meticulous levels of microscopic interrogation of the famous Loro Piana quality control method take place.

‘Those two things really stuck with me,’ she says. ‘It was very powerful going into the lab, and felt a bit sci-fi like the future because of the science; that you could study [the fabric] on that level to learn about the structure of those fibres was extraordinary. The fact that they magnify them 35,000 times just was wild to me.’ The thistle machine, on the other hand, ‘was an extraordinary 19th-century idea of industrialisation, a big machine that’s also a beautiful arts and crafts object.’

While the lab has been recreated in the exhibition space, the original thistle machine made the journey from Varello to Shanghai for the exhibition. ‘I thought of ways of abstracting it or recreating something of it, but nothing competes with it, so I said, I know it’s 800 kilos, but it’s coming!’ laughs Clark.

The thistle – both highly prized tool and brand emblem since the 1950s – is a recurring motif. Clark commissioned her long-term collaborator Jim Patrick to handmake the thistle-adorned tiles that decorate walls. Later, a skirt and hat ensemble is embroidered with an intricate thistle motif and sculptural thistle pins decorate walls.

‘The thistle had to be one of the main objects in the exhibit [as it] plays a double game of being a part of the process that ensures the softness,’ says Clark. ‘I think it’s so lovely that it’s so spiky, but when the fabric is put through the machine it gets softer.’

Immersing visitors in a multisensory experience befitting of a brand so beloved for its tactility, Clark has paid special attention to the materials visitors physically encounter. Alongside depictions of the territories from where Loro Piana sources its noble fibres, lies a fully carpeted and padded corridor lined in its famous ‘cashfur’ that guests are encouraged to touch.

Beside it, 33 silhouettes have been especially handmade using heirloom fabrics and couture techniques. The aforementioned thistle-embroidered ensemble required eight embroiderers, 1000 hours of work, 124,000 glass beads, and 59,000 sequins. They are completed with headpieces by another of Clark’s long-term collaborators, the legendary British milliner Stephen Jones

While the sartorial section prompts petition for Loro Piana entering the haute couture calendar, these are not only non-commercial looks but resolutely ‘rhetorical’ within the space, assures Clark.

‘I think there is something about the complexity of Loro Piana’s history that is truly interesting and that it navigates a century in a very particular way,’ she explains. ‘I wanted people to be free to have other thoughts about Loro Piana. Once you’re not in a shop and you’re in a museum where you can’t buy anything, you can pay attention to all the stories that surround a house like this, which are incredibly sophisticated and complex.’

The multiple mediums of the final room emphasise Clark’s point. Featuring documentary footage collected from each step of Clark’s curatorial process, the introduction of scent strikes a contemplative final note.

‘It’s a double scent; one is the flowers of Valsesia and the other is of wet earth [representing] the fertile landscape [where the cashmere goats are reared],’ says Clark. ‘I wanted the last room to be immersive in a different way. I think all exhibitions are immersive, so it’s a word that for me is slightly overused – but that aside, I did want to do something that reflected contemporary practice as the whole exhibition [documents] a century of museo practice, so it moves with the century.’

A century after Pietro Loro Piana founded Ing Loro Piana & C in Valsesia, it’s a moving account of the craftsmanship over showmanship approach that has established the now LVMH-owned Loro Piana as a leader in the luxury – and, lately, quiet luxury – space. And ultimately, a testament to a brand that clearly knows how best to spend its time.

‘If You Know, You Know: Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence’ runs at Museum of Art Pudong (MAP), Shanghai until May 5, 2025.

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