A life of style: Nicholas Foulkes on his Assouline book celebrating a hundred years of Loro Piana

The celebrated British historian and author speaks with The National about digging into the company archives and his relationship with the family

Sergio and Pier Luigi took over Loro Piana in the 1970s. Photo: Loro Piana

“I came across Loro Piana almost by accident really,” says British author and historian Nicholas Foulkes. “I was in Palm Beach at The Breakers hotel and there was a sort of gentleman’s outfitters. One of the things was a buttercup-coloured or primrose-coloured gilet. It was cashmere with a check lining and a gathered neck.” It was in the late 1990s and Foulkes immediately fell in love with it and the label on the gilet. Today he is the author of Loro Piana: Master of Fibres, a hefty tome from publisher Assouline celebrating the centenary of the family-run and now LVMH-owned Italian brand.

“It was the first time I came into contact with it. It wasn’t really a brand that anybody knew. It wasn’t really a brand even. It was just a maker,” recalls Foulkes. “So I felt quite smug discovering something that was rather good and even more smug when it became very popular.” In the years since, Loro Piana has turned into the quintessential “if you know you know” brand.

How does Foulkes explain the meteoric rise of the house to the heights of the fashion industry in a couple of short decades? “If I knew, I would have done it myself,” he jokes. “I think it’s a type of magic, really. I mean, you had two remarkable men running the company for a start.

“I prefer to talk about quality than luxury. And you had a real passion for quality and a real understanding of the emotion of these objects and how the feel of them is a sensory pleasure in itself.” In the 1970s, the business was taken over by brothers Pier Luigi and Sergio Loro Piana, who took the family’s decades of expertise and transformed the wool specialist supply house – that had been building in prominence since the 1800s – into makers of extremely high-end, exclusive clothes and scarves from the finest wools and fibres money can buy.

By the 1980s, as others looked to cash in on the lure of mass appeal, the brothers instead doubled down on this exclusivity, investing in small farms and rural communities that produce remarkable fibres, such as the world’s most delicate merino wool, a special type of cashmere found only on baby goats and vicuna that can be harvested only every three years, making it the rarest fleece in the world.

“Pier Luigi is a business genius and also a remarkable man when it comes to imagining and then sourcing these extremely recondite fabrics,” says Foulkes. “And Sergio, with whom I used to spend quite a bit of time, was this incredibly stylish man. I mean, if you wanted to kind of cast a stylish Italian industrialist from central casting you would get Sergio. Loro Piana wasn’t a lifestyle brand. He was living the life and that was the Loro Piana life. It was so authentic because it was family,” he adds.

“I believe luxury is about people essentially. It’s about emotional responses to inanimate objects in which you detect the character of the individuals who have made the product. And that for me is when you have that connection and it’s not manufactured,” says Foulkes. He would know, having made a name for himself as one of the foremost chroniclers of luxury, with books on Patek Philippe, Louis Vuitton, a chronicle of men’s fashion called Last of the Dandies, and the famously decadent costume balls of the 20th century.

“To survive in these days, you have to grow, otherwise you’re standing still, going backwards. The trick is to grow while keeping your roots. I think that Loro Piana has succeeded with that because I still wear items of Loro Piana that I’ve had for 20 years.” The book evokes the origins of the brand in a sort of bygone era. Whether it is in the family’s attention to the global jet set – “we started to give our customers solutions to be elegant and comfortable in Saint-Tropez, in Gstaad, in the Hamptons, in their spare time,” says Maria Luisa Loro Piana in the book – or its move to New York in the glorious yuppie days of the 1980s. “That may be me sort of projecting my kind of fondness for this vanished world of glamour on to things,” says Foulkes. “It’s probably why I liked Sergio so much because he had that sort of 1950s elegance about him.”

“It was like a friend was making the stuff for you. Of course it’s a much bigger brand these days, but I think there’s still a personality about it, which is what makes it different.”

Since the brand was bought by LVMH in 2013, Loro Piana has been the subject of a plan to bring it to wider attention. In the recent boom of so-called “quiet luxury”, it was propelled into the spotlight as the poster child for the elusive style. “I don’t like the term quiet luxury because it is a crude and blunt instrument to basically say that stuff that isn’t screamingly logo branded,” says Foulkes. “But Loro Piana was what it was before quiet luxury, and will continue to be that in my opinion.”

He reiterates just how surprised he is by the rapidity of the brand’s rise, even saying it is a privilege to have witnessed something like this happening during his lifetime. “I’ve written everything from articles in HTSI and Vanity Fair, right up to books of several hundred pages. I’ve written a biography of French expressionist Bernard Buffet. I wrote a trilogy of history about 19th century England. I write across a big spread of things. I write the kind of thing that I would like to read. I do my best to make sure that it has been sufficiently researched so that, by the time I’m writing it, I’m more familiar with the world I’m writing about than the world in which I live,” he says. “So while I was writing this book, part of me was living in the world of Loro Piana.” Not a bad place to live, if you ask me.