Quiet-Luxury

When Frédéric Arnault walked into Loro Piana on 1 June 2025, he inherited a 101-year-old cashmere house that had — three months earlier — already committed to opening a four-floor 19th-century townhouse on Via Solferino in Milan as its cultural and commercial centre of gravity. The appointment was announced on 13 March 2025; the maison he took over was no longer the discreet Quarona-born fibre supplier his father Bernard Arnault had bought a controlling stake in for roughly $2.6 billion in July 2013. Under Damien Bertrand’s four years as CEO and Antoine Arnault’s continuing chairmanship, Loro Piana had been pushed — quietly, methodically — out of the wool sheds and into the rooms where furniture, ceramics and curated mid-century objects sit alongside double-ply cashmere. By the time Casa Brera opened during Milan Design Week 2026, the question facing the youngest of LVMH’s heirs was no longer whether Loro Piana could become a fashion-into-design house. It was whether a 31-year-old engineer who had run watches for five years could hold that pivot together while his father’s group posted a -2% organic quarter in Fashion & Leather Goods. ...

The Fondazione Dries Van Noten opened its doors on 25 April 2026 — Venice’s Liberation Day — inside Palazzo Pisani Moretta, the 15th-century Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal that Dries Van Noten and his partner Patrick Vangheluwe purchased from the Sammartini family in the late summer of 2025. The inaugural exhibition, “The Only True Protest is Beauty”, runs to 4 October 2026 and spans 20 rooms across the ground floor and piano nobile, presenting over 200 objects drawn from fashion, jewellery, art, ceramics, glass, photography and design. It is the most explicit statement Van Noten has made since stepping down as creative director of his own house in June 2024 about what, exactly, he was building toward when he was no longer obliged to build collections. ...