Loro Piana looks to the sea for its most innovative materials

An airport can tell you a lot about a place and arriving in Nice Cote d’Azur in early June, I counted no fewer than 14 private jets on the tarmac. Invited to witness the first title sponsorship of the fabled Giraglia regatta by Italian company Loro Piana, the line of planes ultimately was only an amuse-bouche to the sailing boats – custom-built, maxi class yachts that were crowded into the harbour in St Tropez.

Named for being more than 21 metres long, maxi yachts exist solely for racing and are eye-wateringly expensive, rumoured to cost about $150 million each. Seeing them grouped in the harbour awaiting the start of the race left little uncertainty about the investment in the event.

Regarded as the definitive name in high-end knitwear, Loro Piana creates some of the finest clothes money can buy, out of exceptional – and exceptionally rare – materials such as baby cashmere, vicuna (a creature Loro Piana helped save from extinction) and a merino wool so fine that six threads can fit inside one human hair. In Loro Piana’s expert hands, these gossamer threads are transformed into ultra-soft knitwear, scarves and jackets.

So, the question is why an Italian house from the hills of the Piedmont region would want to sponsor top-tier sailing. The answer seemingly lies with one man: Pier Luigi Loro Piana.

The brand was founded by his grandfather in 1924 before being sold to LVMH in 2013 and Pier Luigi is now deputy chairman – as well as a lifelong devotee of sailing. With this unique set of credentials, it is easy to see how his passion has bridged the two, inadvertently helping to steer the company’s offerings.

At the January announcement of Loro Piana’s sponsorship of the Giraglia regatta, chief executive Damien Bertrand explained the bond between the house and sailing. “There has always been a very strong connection between Loro Piana and sailing. We share many common values – tradition, passion, or should I say obsession, for excellence, for perfection, for perseverance.

“Sailing means contact with nature, but also research – it is an extraordinary open-air laboratory that has always been exploited by Loro Piana to experiment with the best performing and most innovative solutions,” Bertrand said.

Sailing has thrown up challenging conditions that require specialist clothing, and Loro Piana has responded, testing technical solutions that still carry its foundational DNA of understated style and elegance. The same delicate fibres woven into jackets, suits and scarves have now also been spun into highly technical outerwear capable of withstanding the wilds of open water.

There are items such as the signature Traveller jacket, remade as a lightweight, crease-resistant microfibre and cashmere blend with a StormSystem water and windproof finish, as well as the Axten windbreaker, a stretch blend of wool, nylon and silk, with an adjustable hood and laser-cut ventilation holes. The Gaxen jacket is water-repellent and comes with neoprene jersey panels to aid wind resistance, while the lightweight Miki gillet is constructed from thermally bonded, water-repellent linen.

All crafted to be warm, light and breathable, these are precisely the sort of no-fuss and sartorially composed pieces that Loro Piana excels at, while offering a robust sailing wardrobe built around the house palette of creams, deep blues, greens and russet reds.

As one of Europe’s most famous sailing races, the Giraglia regatta was founded in 1953 to bolster relations between postwar France and Italy. Scheduled as a series of one-day races around the picturesque bay of St Tropez, the main event is a high-speed dash along the coast to Genoa in Italy, taking in the rocky outcrop of Giraglia en route that gives the race its name. While only 22 boats took part in the first event, this year, 159 boats took to the water, including Pier Luigi’s own racing yacht, MySong.

This is not the first regatta Loro Piana has partnered with. It sponsored the Italian Settimana dei Tre Golfi race between 2004 and 2008 and the Sardinian Loro Piana Superyacht Regatta around Sardinia from 2009 to 2021, creating a bond that has stretched over decades.

The yachts are another facet of a world that values excellence above all else. Only those in the know would recognise the all-black sails as being made from €500,000 ($552,484) worth of carbon fibre, a discretion that dovetails perfectly with the quiet luxury ethos.

On the harbour wall in St Tropez, Loro Piana had constructed an airy, all-cream “racing village” from where guests could relax and enjoy the drama unfolding in the bay beyond. With a crowd predominately dressed in the brand’s laid-back pieces, apparently bought for the sheer pleasure of wearing clothes that are beautifully made, the deep bond between sailing and the house was clearly underlined, bringing with it an easy, almost languid atmosphere, even as the wins were being celebrated.

If this is the unhurried, breezy life in this rarefied stratosphere – where do I sign up?