SYSTEM OF A DOWNPOUR

In late 1966, the most lauded act in popular music history were suffering serious ennui. The staples of rock music — guitars, drums, twin-track recording gear, punishing touring schedules, three-minute chorus-and-verse singles, vacuous album concepts — no longer sated their creative hunger. Instead, given carte blanche by EMI, they started to dabble not only with exotic instruments — ukuleles, sitars, tablas, darbukas, mellotrons — but also backwards guitar riffs, speeded-up piano solos, epic orchestral segues and avant-garde album concepts.

I mention this because a similar vociferous hunger for experimentation, for expansion of repertoire and, crucially, for improvement has characterised Loro Piana’s approach to textiles since its founding, almost a century ago, in. “Unique knowledge that has been developed, built up, over almost a century can today be exploited by discovering and selecting the rarest raw materials, converting the fibres into the finest yarns, and producing the most beautiful fabrics. Only if you master each single step of the process can you really innovate.”