Loro Piana dates its founding to 1924 in Quarona, a Valsesia town with a long wool trade behind it. Over the following decades the house moved from wool merchant to vertically integrated producer, buying fibre at source rather than through brokers. That position is the whole of the pricing argument: the company competes for the finest clips before they reach the open market, and the cost of doing so is carried into the garment.
The fibre itself is the expense. Baby cashmere is combed from the undercoat of Hircus goats and is finer than the cashmere used in most luxury knitwear; the yield per animal is small, which is what sets the floor. Vicuña, at the top of the range, is rarer still. LVMH acquired a majority stake in 2013. None of this is marketing language you have to take on trust — Loro Piana names the grade explicitly on the interior label rather than folding everything into plain "cashmere", which means the hierarchy is legible on any garment you can see a label photograph of.
Most resale listings repeat whatever the seller can read at a glance, and the word that gets typed is "cashmere". That flattens Loro Piana's own hierarchy. Baby cashmere pieces turn up priced against ordinary cashmere sweaters from mid-tier Italian houses, because nothing in the title separates them and the buyer searching for the better material never sees the listing.
Storm System outerwear misses for a different reason. It is a technical treatment sold to a customer who was not shopping for technical outerwear, so the garment photographs as a plain coat, gets described as a plain coat, and clears at the price of one.
Wish, the superfine merino worsted used for tailoring, is the third gap. The fabric name means nothing to someone clearing a wardrobe, and worsted trousers move slowly at resale whoever wove the cloth. That combination keeps asking prices low on pieces where the cloth is the whole point.
