These six designs demonstrate a kinship to material that has long seamed the house’s leather vocabulary
What defines a signature bag? For Loro Piana, it begins with the material. From its early days trading wool in Piedmont, the Italian house developed an exacting relationship with raw fibre – graded, handled, refined – long before leather entered the frame. Here, signature is inheritance, shaped through years of mastery over material.
This season, Loro Piana is celebrating its signature bags – the Extra Pocket, Bale, Extra Bag, Loom, Ghiera Shopper, and Needle – by placing them atop the sinuous, wood-carved 1950s sculptures of French artist Alexandre Noll. Photographed by Charles Negre, the six designs demonstrate a particular kinship that has long seamed the house’s leather vocabulary. Take the Bale, shaped to recall the compression of raw cashmere bundles that remain foundational to the Maison. Or the Needle, cut from a single piece of leather.
Hardware is subtle: a zip arching cleanly across the Extra Pocket, neatly decorated by a miniature padlock and charm. In the design of the Ghiera Shopper, metal rings drawn from spinning machinery anchor the curve of the straps. Across the Extra Bag, topstitching reinforces structure, at ease with the surface it decorates. References to textile production – to the house’s legacy – are functional rather than motif alone.
Craft and art are in natural accord within the Loro Piana universe. Pictured in the campaign, the bags sit easily alongside the works of Alexandre Noll, an artist known for a pared-back approach to curve and grain, so that the material’s own structure could assert itself. In Negre’s photographs, leather and wood have a shared fidelity to material, something that surfaces most visibly in the Loom, whose inside-out construction echoes the logic of weaving translated into leather.
Where Noll allowed wood to speak through its grain, Loro Piana lets leather settle into its own. A signature accrued slowly through the hands that understand the grain – and through bags designed to be held, carried, and lived with over a lifetime.
