Why Is Loro Piana So Expensive? We Followed the Goat

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There is a certain kind of man who wears a plain beige quarter-zip to brunch and says nothing about it. He does not have to. Somewhere in the room, someone else has already clocked it: Loro Piana, roughly $1,750, no logo anywhere.

How does a sweater with no logo cost as much as a used Vespa? We looked into it. The answer involves baby goats, a camel cousin that only gets a haircut every other year and, eventually, LVMH.

Reason One: The Goats Are Babies

Loro Piana’s baby cashmere comes from young goats in Alashan, Inner Mongolia. Each goat is combed exactly once in its life, and only on the soft underbelly. According to Yahoo, that one combing produces about 30 grams of fiber.

Thirty grams. That is roughly the weight of a slice of bread. A sweater, therefore, is the life’s work of a small herd.

The fiber is also absurdly fine: about 13.5 microns, compared with roughly 15 for adult cashmere and about 100 for a human hair. Your scalp is, technically, the coarsest thing in the outfit.

Reason Two: The Vicuña Gets a Haircut Every Two Years

If baby cashmere is the entry-level product, vicuña is the boss level. The vicuña is a small wild relative of the llama that lives on the high plateaus of Peru and Argentina. Per Loro Piana, its fiber is gathered only once every two years, averages 12.5 to 13 microns, and each adult yields about 250 grams of fleece, which drops to 120 to 150 grams once the coarse hairs are picked out.

Loro Piana started working with vicuña in 1994, and in 1997 agreed with the Peruvian government and Andean communities to source the fiber only from living animals. It later helped fund Peru’s first private vicuña reserve (Wikipedia). So the most expensive sweater in your closet is also, oddly, a conservation project.

Reason Three: They Have Been Doing This a While

The family was trading woollen cloth in northern Italy in the early 1800s. The company itself was founded in 1924 by Pietro Loro Piana in Quarona, in Piedmont. That is a century of perfecting the beige sweater, which explains a great deal about the beige sweater.

Reason Four: LVMH

In 2013, LVMH bought 80% of Loro Piana in a deal worth $2.6 billion. By the end of 2025, it owned about 94% (Wikipedia). When the company that owns Louis Vuitton, Dior and Tiffany owns your sweater company, your sweater is not getting cheaper.

Reason Five: The Missing Logo Is the Logo

Loro Piana is the unofficial uniform of quiet luxury, the look of people who would never wear a logo because everyone who matters can already tell. You are not paying for the name on the sweater. You are paying for the name not being on the sweater.

The Verdict

Is it worth it? It is the softest thing you will ever wear, and it is made from the belly fluff of baby goats who were combed once and then left alone. Also, it is a beige sweater. Both things are true.

Shop the Investigation

For the field research. One sweater, no logo, roughly the lifetime output of a small herd of baby goats. Loro Piana now sells only through its own boutiques and website, so even the shopping is exclusive.