In 2022, Loro Piana – the Italian fashion label best known for its world-beating cashmere – introduced CashDenim, a cotton denim delicately infused with the noble fibre, promising the kind of unprecedented softness that devoted aficionados of the brand are used to. Creating the fabric required a collaboration which spanned continents, seeing Loro Piana artisans in Piedmont, Italy work alongside denim experts in the Bingo region of Japan, where the fabric was woven by hand on ancestral looms (a justification for the price tag, whereby a pair of classic five-pocket jeans costs just north of £1,000).
This month, Loro Piana releases its latest take on the once-humble fabric, Denim Silk, a cotton and silk mix denim that is arguably the most luxurious iteration of denim yet. Seen by the house as a summer iteration of CashDenim – the Denim Silk is lighter to the touch and more ‘dynamic’ in movement, as the brand describes – it was once again a shared pursuit between artisans in Piedmont, Italy and Bingo, Japan, who together achieved the careful balance of 59 per cent cotton and 41 per cent silk (no mean feat, considering the delicacy of the latter).
Loro Piana introduces ‘Denim Silk’
Indeed, such is the complexity of the process – which requires the fibres to be woven much slower than in commercial denim production – it takes a whole day to produce just 50 metres of the fabric (the equivalent to around 25 pairs of jeans). The resulting denim, which is light and raw, sees cotton used in the weft (the vertical fibres held stationary on the loom), while silk is used for the warp, the horizontal thread that weaves in and out of the weft. As for CashDenim, the looms used are vintage and passed down through family producers, which Loro Piana says is also a way to retain local know-how.
The resulting Denim Silk for S/S 2024 is used across four women’s denim jackets, including a round-neck riff on the double-breasted blazer (the Catelyn Jacket), a classic denim jacket (the Tulus Jacket) and a safari jacket (the Traveller Jacket). Meanwhile, a pressed-crease palazzo-pant style jean is also cut from the fabric (the Thayer Trousers).
It follows a trend in recent seasons for denim being treated with new reverence – including appearances of the humble fabric at haute couture week in Paris, long the glimmering pinnacle of French dressmaking and savoir-faire. These include Kaia Gerber in a silk-gazar trouser intricately embroidered with thousands of beads in 80 hues of blue to give the appearance of worn-in indigo denim for Valentino’s A/W 2023 haute couture show (later in the collection, model Mona Tougaard wore a classic jean adorned with gold embroidery), while Balenciaga’s Demna has also toyed with such trompe l’oeil tricks in his extraordinary couture collections for the house.
Meanwhile, in Milan, Matthieu Blazy opened his tenure as creative director of Bottega Veneta with his luxurious play on denim – his debut collection, for A/W 2022, opened with a pair of jeans that appeared to be made from classic blue denim, but were actually made from printed leather (and came with an eye-watering price tag of their own).
Loro Piana’s ‘Denim Silk’ is available now from loropiana.com and Loro Piana stores worldwide.
