I Spent Two Years Convincing Myself a Loro Piana Sweater Was a Waste of Money

Two years.

My friend Céleste has this thing where she touches fabric before she says hello. Not like in a weird way. She just walks into a store and her hand goes straight for whatever's cashmere, and she'll tell you within five seconds if it's good or if it's "department store cashmere," which is apparently an insult. She once flew to Milan for a weekend because she needed to walk around. Her words. Not shop. Not eat at some restaurant she saw on Instagram. Walk around. She also had a cedar closet custom-built into her studio apartment, which is not how square footage works but whatever.

She'd been wearing the same Loro Piana baby cashmere crewneck for four years when I finally touched it. I was at her place, it was February, I was cold, she threw it at me. And I remember putting it on and thinking there's something wrong with this fabric. Too soft. Suspiciously soft. Like someone figured out how to knit a cloud into a sweater and forgot to tell anyone it was possible.

I told her it was nice, gave it back, and spent the next two years telling myself it wasn't worth it. A sweater pills, it costs more than my first car payment, you can get cashmere at Uniqlo, next topic. I genuinely believed this. You know how you believe something you've never really tested but it sounds right enough to say at dinner?

Yeah. That.

What Baby Cashmere Actually Is (and Why the Loro Piana Sweater Price Makes More Sense Than You Think)

So here's what I didn't know and kind of wish someone had told me earlier. Baby cashmere isn't a marketing term. Well it is, technically, Loro Piana trademarked it, but the actual material is different from regular cashmere in a way that matters.

It comes from goat kids. Under one year old. Capra Hircus, if you want the Latin name that I had to look up twice because I kept forgetting it. Each baby goat produces maybe 30 grams of usable fiber. Compare that to an adult goat's 200 grams. So right away you're dealing with something like seven times scarcer at the raw material level, which doesn't fully explain a $1,460 sweater but it starts to.

The fiber diameter is 13.5 microns. One micron is one millionth of a meter. Regular cashmere runs 15 to 19 microns. Those numbers meant nothing to me until Céleste's sweater. Now I think about microns more than any normal person should.

Here's the part that actually got to me though. Pier Luigi Loro Piana found this fiber visiting goat herders in China and then spent TEN YEARS convincing them to separate the kid fiber from the adult fiber. Then another ten years learning how to spin it properly. Twenty years for a crewneck. I don't know if that's inspiring or insane or both.

The other thing nobody tells you. Cashmere gets softer with age. Not worse. Softer. Céleste's four-year-old baby cashmere felt better than my brand new cashmere from... I won't say which brand but you can probably guess and I'm still a little mad about it. Your grandmother's cashmere sweater that never pilled? It's because the loose fibers had already worked themselves out over decades. The fabric basically trained itself.

They've also been doing the sustainability thing since 2019, partnering with ICCAW and the Sustainable Fiber Alliance. First certified batches came through in 2021. I bring this up because it matters, and also because the sourcing conversation gets way more complicated once you start talking about vicuña.

The Loro Piana Price Landscape in 2026

Right, so. The prices.

Entry level is their cashmere blends. Empire Wish Wool Crewneck at $1,425. Cocooning Cashmere Crewneck at $2,475. Cashmere-coarsehair stuff like the Carezza and Paroo runs $2,680 to $2,920. Fine. Normal luxury cashmere sweater territory. You can see the full women's knitwear range on their site.

Baby cashmere is where my brain breaks a little. Women's Coste Crewneck starts at $1,460 which is actually, weirdly, the best deal in their whole knitwear range if you think about it on a fiber-quality-per-dollar basis. Classic Turtleneck at $1,770. Pablo Sweater, $2,190. The cable-knit Treccia at $2,560. Jubilee Bomber Sweater? $6,450. For a sweater. A sweater that you will spill coffee on at some point because you are a human being.

And then. Vicuña.

Women's crewneck starts $4,950. Coste Turtleneck hits $11,300. Vicuña comes from wild vicuñas in the Peruvian Andes, like 13,000 feet up, and they can only be sheared every two years. Loro Piana's been buying from the Lucanas community since 1994. I need to mention that Bloomberg did an investigation in March 2024 that raised serious questions about the whole thing. The community apparently receives about $280 for fiber that ends up in a $9,000 sweater. Raw material is only 2 to 3 percent of retail. Make of that what you will. I don't know what the right answer is there.

Then there's Gift of Kings Merino. 12-micron merino wool. Blockchain-certified traceability since 2022. Quarter-zip starts at $3,410. It's lighter than cashmere so you can actually wear it in spring without overheating, which is kind of the whole point.

The Math Everyone Gets Wrong About Luxury Cashmere Sweaters

Okay so my friend Vittorio is an accountant. Like, professionally boring about money. He has a spreadsheet for grocery spending. He tracks his electricity usage by month. He once told me he enjoys reviewing his bank statements, which I think was a joke but I honestly can't tell with him.

When I mentioned the Loro Piana thing he grabbed his phone and started calculating before I even finished the sentence. That's Vittorio.

The Coste Crewneck at $1,460. He wears things twice a week minimum when he likes them, so call it 56 wears per cool-weather season, October through April. Year one: $26 a wear. Year three: $8.69. By year ten, if the thing survives, $2.61.

Not bad. But then he said the thing that actually rewired my thinking, and I'm going to credit him even though he'll be annoying about it. He said it's not just price divided by wears. It's replacement cost. A J.Crew sweater on sale, $40, pills out after 20 wears, that's $2 per wear, sure. But you're buying a new one every year and a half. Over ten years that's like six or seven sweaters. $240 to $280. Still cheaper than the Loro Piana but not by the margin you'd expect.

Plus you recoup resale on the LP when you're done with it. Plus what Vittorio called "joy per wear" and I swear I almost dropped my drink because that is the least accountant thing anyone has ever said.

Pre-owned math is where it gets really interesting though. Baby cashmere on The RealReal for around $800. Same 56 wears a year, that's $14.29 per wear year one, $4.76 by year three. The Luxury Closet did a calculation on a $1,200 pre-owned piece worn 200 times and got $6 per wear. Which is basically how people who actually think about investment-minded wardrobes approach this stuff. Not "is this sweater worth $1,460" but "what does this cost me per use over a decade."

Loro Piana vs Brunello Cucinelli: The Comparison That Actually Matters

Everyone googles this. Literally everyone. I've done it myself like four times and the results are always these weird spec comparison articles that list founding dates and fiber diameters but never tell you what the sweaters actually FEEL like, which seems like the whole point?

Loro Piana is softer. That's just true. When you compare baby cashmere vs cashmere from Cucinelli, the 13.5-micron thing is real and you notice it immediately. Not subtly. Immediately.

But here's where I get in trouble with Céleste. Brunello Cucinelli makes a better-constructed sweater. I said it. Reinforced underarm areas, more structure, holds its shape after fifty wears. A Loro Piana drapes. It hangs. It does that relaxed, unstructured, I-just-happen-to-look-like-this thing. A Cucinelli stands up straighter. Under a blazer? Cucinelli every time. Under nothing, alone, on a Sunday morning with coffee? LP.

Some context. LP was founded 1924. Six generations. Cucinelli started in 1978. LP got bought by LVMH in 2013, family kept 20 percent. Cucinelli is publicly traded but the family still runs it, and they've got this whole "humanistic capitalism" philosophy with the Solomeo Foundation that's... I mean, I'm generally skeptical of corporations claiming to be ethical but Cucinelli's track record is honestly kind of hard to argue with.

Prices overlap way more than people think. $1,200 to $2,500 for cashmere from either brand. The only real divergence is at the top end because LP has vicuña and Cucinelli doesn't make anything in that range.

I told Céleste once that Cucinelli might actually be the better choice for some people. She looked at me the way you'd look at someone who just recommended instant coffee. But I stand by it. You have kids? Pets? Need something that can handle daily friction? Cucinelli. That's just practical.

Is a Loro Piana Sweater Worth It? Who It's Actually For

So this is the part where I'm supposed to do the recommendation thing. Try if this, skip if that. Neat little boxes.

I can't. Is Loro Piana worth it? Honestly it depends on stuff that a stranger on the internet can't know about you.

My friend Solange. She bought her first LP baby cashmere pre-owned. Classic turtleneck off The RealReal, I think she paid around $850. She wears it from September through March, probably 60 times a year. She hand-washes it with LP's cashmere soap, which has olive oil in it to moisturize the fibers, and yes I also thought that sounded fake the first time I heard it. She dries it flat between towels. Cedar balls in storage. Three years now and the thing looks like it did when she bought it. For Solange that was the right call. She already had a complete wardrobe. She wanted one excellent neutral piece. She got it.

Then there's Vittorio's sister. Different story entirely. Bought a seasonal color on impulse, some kind of dusty rose or something, wore it maybe twelve times, tried to resell and the value had tanked. Because that's the thing. Classic crewnecks and turtlenecks in neutral colors hold their resale. Seasonal stuff doesn't. You can check resale data on The RealReal right now and cashmere in excellent condition holds maybe 40 to 55 percent of retail. Baby cashmere does a bit better. It's a similar pattern to how different luxury categories retain value actually. Jewelry, bags, clothing, they all follow this rule where the classics survive and the trendy stuff craters.

Care stuff that's worth knowing. LP says never wear the same cashmere sweater two days running because the fibers need time to recover their structure. Hand wash every 4 to 5 wears. No dry cleaning. Never ever store in plastic bags because friction against plastic is what causes pilling. And about pilling. The counterintuitive thing. Softer cashmere pills MORE initially, not less. Baby cashmere and vicuña will pill at first because the fibers are so fine. It decreases over time as the loose ones work out naturally. Get a cashmere comb for like $4 on Amazon. Some Styleforum people say they've had zero pilling in ten years on cashmere-silk blends. Others say their Roadster models pilled like crazy. So maybe it varies by line. I genuinely couldn't tell you.

The Smart Way Into Loro Piana Knitwear

Look, if you're buying your first luxury cashmere sweater I think pre-owned is the move. I really do. The RealReal has the biggest authenticated selection. Vestiaire Collective is good for older European pieces. eBay has like 2,460 Italy-made LP items last time I checked, but authentication is entirely on you, which is a risk I personally wouldn't take but some people are comfortable with it. Check the fiber content on the label. Make sure it says Made in Italy. Look at pilling, it can be fixed but it tells you how hard the previous owner wore it. Same philosophy as building an investment wardrobe piece by piece rather than blowing your budget on one impulse.

At retail? Coste Crewneck in baby cashmere, women's, $1,460. That's the lowest entry into baby cashmere and honestly probably the smartest first purchase. Best value is a pre-owned classic turtleneck for $700 to $900. If you want to splurge, the Treccia at $2,560, it's this cable knit that has actual character and it ages really well.

Vicuña? I don't know. Unless you've got the budget and you've actually sat with the Bloomberg reporting and made your peace with it, I'd say no. I haven't bought vicuña. Haven't bought any of it actually. I keep thinking about Céleste's baby cashmere crewneck and how it felt that February and how four years of wearing hadn't changed it at all and I think, yeah, baby cashmere is probably where the real value sits. Not vicuña, too loaded with questions. Not regular cashmere, too close to what you can get elsewhere. That weird middle tier where the scarcity is real but the garment is still something you'd actually wear on a Tuesday.

Vittorio would tell you to run the numbers first. Solange would tell you to find the right pre-owned piece and stop overthinking it. Céleste would just hand you her sweater and not say anything.

I still haven't bought one.

What about you?

Loro Piana Sweater FAQ

How much does a Loro Piana sweater cost?

Prices start around $1,425 for cashmere blends and go past $11,300 for vicuña. Baby cashmere, which is Loro Piana's signature fiber, runs between $1,460 and $6,450 depending on the style.

Is Loro Piana cashmere worth the price?

At 13.5 microns, their baby cashmere is legitimately some of the finest fiber you can buy commercially. If you wear a $1,460 sweater 50-plus times a year for a decade you're under $3 per wear. Whether that math matters to you depends on how often you'd actually reach for it and whether you're okay with hand-washing.

How long does a Loro Piana sweater last?

Ten to twenty years if you take care of it. That means hand washing every 4 to 5 wears, never wearing the same sweater two days in a row, flat drying, cedar storage. Not low maintenance.

Does Loro Piana cashmere pill?

Every cashmere pills. The finer the fiber, the more it pills at first, which is counterintuitive but true. Baby cashmere and vicuña pill initially then it decreases. A cashmere comb handles it.

Loro Piana vs Brunello Cucinelli: which is better?

LP wins on softness, specifically baby cashmere at 13.5 microns. Cucinelli wins on construction, structure, and shape retention. They overlap at $1,200 to $2,500 for standard cashmere. LP for standalone pieces you wear alone. Cucinelli for layering and coordinated outfits.

Loro Piana Fiber Comparison