Loro Piana shows its mens and women’s collections intermingled on mannequins. Walking through the crowd of strikingly styled and hat-heavy—especially in womenswear—static ensembles today we heard how these collections majored on linen, and saw some interesting fabrications. It turns out if you mix linen with cashmere in an undyed cable knit cardigan, its hand-feel retains more of the flaxy hardiness of the vegetal softness of the animal. Linen was elsewhere blended with Manila hemp—a banana plant—or used in handsome triple-bonded summer raincoat cut for both genders. There were linen-silk blends, twisted linens, and linen flower prints.
Linen’s most appealing properties include moisture absorption and breathability. Once you breathed a little and instead of trying to absorb the full spectrum of this Loro Piana-verse focused on picking out individual garments—imaginary shopping, basically—today’s presentation became breezier. Womenswear highlights included a gorgeously finished leather field jacket that would have looked delightful over some washed LP denim and a vintage martini-print silk shirt. A highly impressive embroidered and shaved cashmere jacket in a ribbed liner shape looked like a wonderful vintage piece.
In menswear a placket fronted suede-collared country jacket— inevitably in treated linen—and a linen-silk (I think) pale herringbone peak-collared suit and shirt were amongst the many fine items. There was a wonderful tweedish looking linen top coat and an irregular oaty melange pattern: however, worn over a gray birds eye work waistcoat, round neck sweater, tie, shirt and double-pleat flannel pant, it looked more 1950s country doctor than 2020s luxury connoisseur. The styling here was too total and too fusty.
Past a display of handsome new sunglass styles in Japanese acetate was a room packed with bags that included a cashmere(ish) to the touch nubuck tote lined in real cashmere and a rather small drawstring backpack. The most exciting detail was shown between that room and the next room’s archive of Loro Piana printed scarves: looped from the shoulder of another mannequin was a leather strap whose two buckles were tied into the corners of one of those silk scarves to fashion an ad hoc handbag. That seemed like a pretty interesting way of wearing a ‘bag’ that could be renewed every time the customer acquired a new scarf.