There are only a handful of businesses anywhere that have been run by the same family since before the industrial revolution, and fewer still that are any good at what they do. Fratelli Piacenza is both. Pietro Francesco Piacenza started milling at Pollone in the Biella hills in 1733, and the house is now run by the thirteenth generation of the family. What that buys you is not romance. It is a house that has had three centuries to learn what a noble fibre will and will not do, and that has never had to explain itself to a quarterly meeting.
Pollone, 1733, and thirteen generations
Piacenza was founded in 1733 by Pietro Francesco Piacenza at Pollone, a village in the Biella district that has been the centre of Italian wool for as long as Italy has made wool. The mill has been in the same family ever since, through wars, industrial revolutions and every crisis in between, and Carlo Piacenza is the thirteenth generation to run it.
That is rare enough to be formally recognised. Piacenza is a member of Les Hénokiens, an association open only to companies that have been continuously operating and family-owned for at least two hundred years. There are not many of those in any industry, and very few of them weave cloth.
The house motto is tradition in evolution, which sounds like the sort of thing a mill puts on a wall until you look at what they actually do. The oldest continuously running practices sit alongside genuinely modern finishing, and neither is treated as decoration.
Noble fibres, and the thistle
Piacenza built its name on what the trade calls noble fibres: cashmere, vicuña, camelhair, alpaca, mohair, silk and very fine wool. Australian merino, Peruvian vicuña, Mongolian cashmere. This is a house that buys at the top of the fibre market and has done for a very long time.
The detail worth knowing is the finishing. Piacenza still brush cloth with teasels, the dried head of a thistle, rather than only with wire. A thistle is softer than metal and it breaks before it tears a fibre, so it raises the surface of a cashmere or a camelhair without damaging what makes that fibre worth having. It is slower and it costs more. You can feel it in the hand of the finished cloth, and the thistle on their mark is not decoration either.
Where Piacenza belongs in a Chennai wardrobe
We will be honest with you about this one. A great deal of the Piacenza book is cashmere, camelhair and heavy jacketing, and that is cloth for a cold country. A camelhair coat is a beautiful thing and it is the wrong thing for Chennai in almost every month of the year.
Where it earns its place here is in two situations. The first is the jacket for travelling, if your work takes you to Europe or north India in winter and you want one very good jacket rather than three ordinary ones. The second is their fine wool and wool-silk jacketing in the lighter weights, which is a different proposition entirely and works well for a Chennai evening.
Piacenza cloth is available to order through us. If you are considering it, tell us where the garment is going to be worn before we open the book, because the answer changes which half of it we look at.