Words by Jemma Pinueva
Courtesy of Loro Piana
To mark its centenary, Loro Piana has opened its first-ever exhibition: If You Know, You Know: Loro Piana’s Quest for Excellence. Held at the Museum of Art Pudong (MAP) in Shanghai, the show offers a quiet, layered portrait of the Italian house — a brand synonymous with the rarest materials, measured innovation and an almost obsessive devotion to craft. Curated by Judith Clark, the exhibition translates Loro Piana’s ethos into a sensorial and reflective journey that resists spectacle in favour of intimacy.
For the first time, the Museum of Art Pudong, designed by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, welcomes a luxury house into its galleries. The choice of Shanghai is not incidental: China has long been a key part of Loro Piana’s story, from the sourcing of cashmere to the building of important relationships across industries and generations.
If You Know, You Know is less a retrospective and more a tactile essay. Visitors move through a series of interconnected landscapes where natural textures — wood, leather, brass and cashmere — create a grounded, almost domestic sense of space.
Courtesy of Loro Piana
The exhibition opens with The Story of Loro Piana, a ‘museum within a museum’ that draws from the brand’s vast Archivio Storico in Varallo, in Piedmont, Italy. Early photographs, weaving manuals and sample books are displayed alongside artworks loaned from the Pinacoteca di Varallo and the Sergio and Luisa Loro Piana Collection. Here, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri and other postwar Italian artists offer a material and conceptual counterpoint to the textiles on display — a reminder that innovation, for Loro Piana, has always been as much about ideas as about fibres.
As the exhibition moves forward, the focus shifts from the archival to the sensory. In Into Fashion, the Maison’s signature designs — Traveller jackets, Horsey coats and Open walk shoes — are reimagined through tactile installations. Headpieces in this section were conceived by British milliner Stephen Jones, a long-time collaborator of the Maison and the twelfth curator of A Magazine Curated By.
Courtesy of Loro Piana
Further on, miniature dioramas of the landscapes of China, Japan, the Andes, New Zealand and France honour the sources of the Maison’s rarest fibres.
The final rooms explore the historical narrative. The Thistle Room honours Loro Piana’s textile heritage through a sculptural installation of antique thistle machines, tools once used to soften fabrics without breaking the fibres, shown alongside intricate embroidery, ceramic tiles and carved displays.
Courtesy of Loro Piana
Everywhere, craft is treated not as nostalgia but as a living practice.
Restaging Valsesia, the closing installation, brings the story home. An immersive film transports visitors to the lush valleys of Piedmont, birthplace of Loro Piana’s tradition. Even the screens, woven from Loro Piana textiles, reinforce the exhibition’s guiding belief: that luxury, at its purest, is a dialogue between hand, land and time.
By foregrounding tactility, history and the poetics of place, If You Know, You Know quietly redefines what it means to stage a centenary. Rather than looking back in nostalgia, Loro Piana chooses to celebrate what’s often unseen.
It is, fittingly, a show for those who know. And for those who don’t yet — an invitation to look closer.
Courtesy of Loro Piana
Open from March 22 to May 5, 2025 at the Museum of Art Pudong (MAP) in Shanghai.
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