INVEST
Loro Piana Vicuña / Storm System trench coat
“In any industry,” Pier Luigi Loro Piana told The Rake some years ago, “the materials you use are the starting point for how your production philosophy is going to unfold in the future. It’s like being in a kitchen — if you have the very best raw ingredients, you have to be a pretty bad chef to ruin the end product… ”
Loro Piana, it’s fair to say, take materials very seriously indeed. Hailing from Italy’s textile production heartland of Trivero, the Loro Piana family started out as wool fabric merchants at the beginning of the 19th century, and the label these days is engaged in a dogged pursuit not just of new materials — such as the rare fibre hand-made from the stalks of Lotus flowers that float on Inle Lake in Myanmar, which Pier Luigi discovered in 2009 — but of pioneering methodologies such as Storm System.
A registered Loro Piana trademark, this treatment involves an absorbent yet hydrophilic membrane being
