Loro Piana’s 100 Years of Heritage Are on (Beautiful) Display

The last fashion exhibition I went to see was “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was a rainy spring morning, the exhibit had kicked off mere days earlier. I lined up on those famed front steps a half hour before the museum opened. Once inside, I made a beeline for the second floor, past the antiquities, breezing through the Impressionists rooms to be one of the first to access the Costume Institute exhibition that day. I wanted to enjoy it without having to dodge strangers’ shoulders or duck between hands holding iPhones to the glass displays.

There are many wonderful ways to enjoy fashion: getting dressed up, shopping, attending a runway show. But an exhibition will always remain among my favourites. It’s a powerful reminder that fashion and garment construction is unquestionably an art form — and an immersive one at that.

“Exhibitions are, in my opinion, like three dimensional essays; a story that both shows and tells,” says Judith Clark, professor of Fashion and Museology at the London College of Fashion and a highly regarded curator. Clark’s curatorial CV counts major exhibitions at the V&A, the Mode Museum in Antwerp and the Cristobal Balenciaga Museum in Getaria, Spain, to name just a few.

Most recently, Clark was tapped to curate an exhibition with Loro Piana, as part of the Italian luxury brand’s 100th anniversary. Taking place at the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai, and called “If You Know, You Know. Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence,” the exhibition pays homage to the heritage and exacting craftsmanship of the house.

It’s an imaginative and multi-sensory experience that pulls together archival documents, artwork, heirloom fabrics and fibres. There are also 33 custom made “dramatic silhouettes” — fantastical, avant-garde clothing designs meant to showcase the relationship between the source material, the places it comes from and the process of transforming it into stunning, desirable pieces. An entire “cocooning room” features one cashmere wall and one covered in jacket-lining material, and a hallway connecting the gallery rooms is covered in cashmere fur (and, yes, petting the walls is allowed).

When concepting the exhibition, Clark went through the Loro Piana archive. She says she was looking for something that is both “precious and symbolic at the same time.” She goes on to add that, “Objects need to do a lot of work within exhibitions in order to carry elements of the story.” Clark was also looking for “clues” to help inform the three-dimensional design of the exhibition’s rooms and its decorative details.

There are plenty of unexpected elements. The rubber used on the soles of Loro Piana’s iconic White Sole shoes has been used as cabinet supports and archival photographs of the vast territories where Loro Piana has sourced its vicuña, cashmere, linen and merino wool are reimagined as three-dimensional wooden carvings.

“I wanted the visitor to become curious,” says Clark, noting that “Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence” is the subtitle of the exhibition. “So the visitor will be wondering about that quest,” she says. Still, Clark did not want the exhibit to feel “heavy handed.” Instead, the exhibit zooms into the fibre, puts the softness of the textiles onto the walls for visitors to actually feel, or shows the extreme complexity of the weaving process. “You start to look at the pieces in a different way: quests are about chasing the apparently impossible; here it is extreme lightness, extreme softness achieved from travel to remote places and intergenerational skills,” Clark says.

Loro Piana is the first fashion house to be showcased in this state-of-the-art museum, which sits on the banks of the Huangpu River, and is designed by acclaimed Parisian architecture firm Ateliers Jean Nouvel. It runs until May 5th, 2025. I’m not being dramatic when I say I’m considering a ticket.