Loro Piana Celebrates Creative Hands With Dinner at London’s Royal Academy of Arts

CASHMERE AND CULTURE: Loro Piana raised the curtain on Christmas party season with a candlelit dinner at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, marking its new partnership with the academy’s schools, and its holiday takeover of Harrods.

It may have felt a little early to be decking the halls, but not for Loro Piana, which filled the foyer of the Academy on Piccadilly with twinkling Christmas trees, and clusters of candles in glass sconces. During the cocktail there was even an a cappella choir singing season-appropriate songs.

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“Don’t expect me to sing tonight — I won’t,” Damien Bertrand, Loro Piana’s chief executive officer, told the crowd as he raised a glass to “the hands that nurture the finest natural fibers” — and to the party venue, too.

“The Royal Academy is a place of creation, learning and debate, and we honor its history,” added Bertrand of the institution, which was founded in 1768 by an international group of male and female artists, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, who would become its first president.

As reported, Loro Piana is funding scholarships and bursaries for students at the Royal Academy Schools, the longest established schools of fine art in the U.K.

It is also supporting the public program in the Weston Studio, the RA Schools’ dedicated, on-site public project space for exhibitions.

Bertrand had earlier told WWD, “If we can give back to these young talents and artists, if we can give them the opportunity to develop their passions, then we will.”

The dinner took place upstairs on tables covered with white flowers, candles and the charming wooden puppet figures of Loro Piana artisans, which are currently on display in windows at Harrods.

Guests included Luisa and Vittoria Loro Piana, Kit Harrington, Kelly Rutherford, Edie Campbell, Juergen Teller, Nikolai Von Bismarck, Stephen Jones, Tallulah Harlech, Bianca Brandolini, Freida Pinto and a host of Loro Piana clients and friends of the house who’d swept into the British capital from France, Italy — and Gstaad — to talk yarn counts and the beauty of living in a cashmere-padded world.

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