Unspinning the fairy tale of fashion’s finest.
–Katya Moorman
If I said the word sweatshop and asked you to name what comes to mind, chances are you’d say fast fashion. Or maybe Shein. H&M. Zara. It’s baked into our collective understanding now: cheap clothes come at a high human cost.
But you wouldn’t think of Loro Piana.
In fact, unless you read Vogue Business or scroll Net-a-Porter with purpose, you might not even recognize the name. Unlike brands relentlessly advertised like Chanel and Michael Kors, Loro Piana has built its image on discretion. It’s positioned as the pinnacle of quiet luxury—a brand revered for its rarefied materials, meticulous craftsmanship, and an ethos of understatement so controlled it feels almost sacred. And of course: sweaters that cost thousands of dollars.
A recent Who What Wear piece gushed over the celebrities and influencers who wear it, calling Loro Piana “the Uniqlo for billionaires.” The phrase is designed to stir FOMO just before the affiliate links drop. The message? If you know, you know. And if you can afford it, you belong.
Acquired by LVMH in 2013, Loro Piana has inspired near-religious devotion among fans who covet its knitwear made from baby cashmere and vicuña. Its garments aren’t just expensive. They’re marketed as untouchable—crafted with such care and natural beauty that they seem to transcend trends, seasons, and even scrutiny.
This is the mythology that has defined Loro Piana for decades—luxury as a kind of modern fairy tale, spun from rare fibers and whispered status. But myths, like fabric, can unravel.
Recently, I came across a news story of allegations of abuse that stopped me cold.
“In a factory on the outskirts of Milan, a Chinese tailor spent the last 10 years sewing jackets for just under $5 an hour. He worked 13-hour days without a single day off. Late last year, he stopped getting paid at all. When he complained, his employer beat him so badly with an aluminium and plastic tube that he had to go to the emergency room.”
— Sarah Kent, Business of Fashion, July 2025
This wasn’t a supplier in Dhaka or Guangdong. This was in Italy—working for Loro Piana. Loro Piana. The brand that trades on purity. On the idea that if you pay enough you’re buying into a better world.
While researching this piece—intending at first to interrogate the false divide between fast and luxury fashion—I found another thread to pull: a 2024 Bloomberg Businessweek exposé about vicuña sourcing, conservation, and the Peruvian communities who make Loro Piana’s ultra-luxury garments possible.
If the sweatshop story was a rupture, the vicuña story was the slow unravel.
Vicuñas are wild camelids native to the high Andes, closely related to llamas and alpacas, and are known for producing the world’s finest natural fiber. Their ultra-soft fleece can only be shorn every three years and must be hand-collected under strict conservation protocols, making it exceptionally rare and valuable.
Vicuñas were once near extinction but have been protected and brought back through conservation, and respectfully sheared by the communities that have lived alongside them for generations. A rare, delicate fiber gathered without harm. A symbol of fashion aligned with nature and culture and a process that seemingly benefited everyone.
That’s the narrative Loro Piana sold. And if it were true, this could have been a model for how fashion might support ecosystems, livelihoods, and beauty in balance. Instead, it’s become another cautionary tale. Because beyond the price of the sweaters it carries a cost rarely accounted for. Not necessarily in how the animals are treated, but in how the people behind the fiber are forgotten. In Lucanas, Peru, local herders round up and shear wild vicuñas each year in a centuries-old practice known as the Chaku.
Yet, according to Bloomberg, “In New York, Milan or London, the fashion house Loro Piana sells a vicuña sweater for about $9,000. The Indigenous community of Lucanas, whose only customer is Loro Piana, receives about $280 for an equivalent amount of fiber.”
These communities live in poverty-like conditions, while the brand profits off land many say was never meant to be privatized. Even the most “natural” luxury can slip into exploitation when brands see land and labor as resources to mine rather than relationships to honor. Of course, Loro Piana/LVMH denies wrongdoing. But denial doesn’t equal accountability.
If these facts make anything clear, it’s this: the assumption that luxury holds itself to higher standards than fast fashion no longer holds. So we have to stop letting brands tell us what luxury is. Their version is increasingly akin to the Emperor’s new clothes—all surface and status, with nothing of real substance beneath.
We need to reclaim the word LUXURY.
How do we do this? We start by refusing to let branding define our values. We start by asking harder questions—not just of the Guccis and LVMHs of the world, but of ourselves. About what we choose to elevate, what stories we buy into, and what kind of system we’re silently endorsing every time we get dressed.
Luxury should mean:
- natural, regenerative materials
- transparent and ethical sourcing
- deep respect for the people and ecosystems involved
- garments designed to last—not just physically, but culturally
- and a sense of enoughness that stands outside the churn
If fashion wants to claim the language of beauty, it has to be honest about where that beauty begins—and who it belongs to. And if that means tearing down long-held assumptions and building new definitions in their place, so be it.
Because the future of fashion—and of real luxury—isn’t stitched from illusion. It’s built on integrity. And that’s something that ultimately can’t be faked.
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