Pietro Loro Piana, an engineer, founded Ing. Loro Piana & C. at Quarona in Piedmont in 1924, though his family had been trading wool cloth out of Trivero since the early 1800s. What separates the house from every other Italian mill is the fibre. They go further up the supply chain than anyone, buying the finest merino bales in Australia and New Zealand, working vicuña in Peru, sourcing cashmere in Mongolia. Most of what you read about Loro Piana concerns the extraordinary end of that range. The cloth we actually reach for in Chennai is the Tasmanian, and there is a good reason for it.
Founded 1924, six generations in wool
The Loro Piana family were wool cloth merchants in Trivero from the early nineteenth century, then moved into Valsesia and set up spinning mills. The company as it exists now dates from 1924, when Pietro Loro Piana founded his firm at Quarona in the province of Vercelli. He was an engineer, and his instinct was to control every stage rather than leave any of it to middlemen.
Franco Loro Piana took the business international after the war. In the 1970s and 1980s his sons Sergio and Pier Luigi pushed it into ready-to-wear and luxury goods, while keeping fabric development at the centre of everything. The mills are still in the Valsesia valley, with a cashmere operation in Ulaanbaatar.
LVMH bought 80 per cent of the business in 2013, went to 85 per cent by 2017 and to 94 per cent in 2025, with the founding family retaining the rest. The ownership change matters less to a tailor than you would think. The fibre programmes and the mills are where they always were, and the cloth on our shelf behaves the way Loro Piana cloth has always behaved.
Record Bale, The Gift of Kings and vicuña
Loro Piana run an annual Record Bale award, a prize given to the Australian and New Zealand growers who produce the single finest bale of merino in a season. The 2013 bale measured 10.3 microns. A human hair is around 80. That competition is not marketing decoration; it is how the house secures first call on the best fleeces in the world before anyone else sees them.
The Gift of Kings is the fibre that comes out of that programme, merino of roughly 12 microns, finer than most cashmere. Vicuña is the other one. Loro Piana began working the fibre in 1994 and reached an agreement with Peru in 1997 to take it only from live, shorn animals, which is why the trade in it is legal and sustainable at all.
We will show you those bunches if you ask. We will also tell you plainly that a vicuña or Gift of Kings garment is not something to wear to a Chennai office in April. That end of the range is for a coat you wear somewhere cold, or for a customer who wants the finest fibre on earth and knows exactly what he is buying.
Tasmanian, and why it fits this city
Tasmanian is the Loro Piana cloth that earns its place in Chennai. They created it in the 1960s to answer a specific new problem: people wanted suits that were light, versatile and resistant to creasing, and that worked in air-conditioned buildings. It took its name from the merino of Tasmania, which is what it was originally woven from.
Sixty years on, that brief describes a Chennai working week better than it described anything in 1965. You leave a cold office, you sit in traffic, you walk fifty metres in real heat, you go back into cold air. Tasmanian handles that swing. It is a fine worsted with enough twist and enough structure to come out of a car looking like a suit, and it is light enough that you are not fighting it.
Alongside it, Zelander is woven from fine New Zealand wool, Wish sits at Super 170s from merino averaging no more than 15 microns, and Four Seasons at Super 130s covers the middle ground for anyone who wants one suit to work in November and in May. For a first Loro Piana commission here, Tasmanian is nearly always the sensible answer and Wish is the indulgent one.
Loro Piana at our counter
Loro Piana is a name most customers already know before they walk in, usually from the shop floor rather than from a bunch. What they have not seen is what the same cloth does when it is cut from a pattern drafted off their own measurements and fitted twice in our workshop on Sardar Patel Road.
We will be honest about where it belongs. For a suit worn three days a week in Chennai, a Tasmanian in navy or charcoal is money well spent and will still look right in a decade. For the higher counts, we would rather you kept them for the commissions that deserve them, and we will say so at the counter rather than after the cloth is cut.
The Loro Piana bunches are available to order through us across the suiting collections. Put a Tasmanian next to a standard tropical worsted and the difference in how it springs back in your hand explains most of the price on its own.