Loro Piana Fall 2026 Back to School Campaign

Higher Learning

Review of Loro Piana Fall 2026 Ad Campaign by with Photographer Sam Rock with models Kim Woosang, Libby Taverner

Loro Piana heads back to school for Fall 2026, although there is little danger of anyone here being sent to detention. Photographed by Sam Rock at the Sorbonne in Paris and starring models Kim Woosang and Libby Taverner, the campaign places the house’s quietly luxurious wardrobe within one of Europe’s great temples of scholarship. It is an almost mischievously appropriate pairing: a brand built on obsessive knowledge of fibers enters an institution built on the pursuit of knowledge itself. Consider this advanced studies in cashmere, with exceptionally good attendance.

Rock makes the Sorbonne more than an aristocratic-looking backdrop. Its worn wooden lecture halls, curved benches, chalkboards, stone corridors, monumental paintings, and tall windows establish a visual vocabulary of age, permanence, and accumulated knowledge. The architecture bears evidence of generations passing through it, just as Loro Piana’s clothes derive much of their appeal from traditions of material expertise refined over time. There is nothing hurried about either. Even the wood seems to have acquired a patina through years of study.

The photography is particularly successful when sunlight enters the equation. Rock lets strong shafts of natural light rake across the wood paneling and clothing, illuminating a blue shirt here, catching the surface of a tweed there, or outlining Taverner’s voluminous hair against a darkened room. The resulting palette is beautiful: tobacco, rust, moss, charcoal, parchment, chalky gray, indigo, and flashes of academic blue. Rather than making autumn look gloomy, the campaign makes it look intellectually seductive. One can almost smell old books, polished oak, and very expensive wool.

The styling plays cleverly with familiar academic codes without turning them into costume. Tweed jackets, waistcoats, cardigans, collared shirts, softly pleated trousers, berets, trench coats, and sturdy outerwear naturally belong to this world, but their proportions keep the images contemporary. Taverner can appear almost professorial in a structured jacket and moments later resemble the student who has decided the lecture bench is a perfectly reasonable place for a nap. Woosang’s tailoring is similarly relaxed, particularly when formal jackets are interrupted by denim, knitwear, or a vivid blue shirt. The gender dialogue is understated but effective: neither wardrobe feels rigidly assigned, and both are governed by the same vocabulary of texture, layering, and ease.

That is important because “Back to School” could easily have slipped into an overly literal exercise in collegiate nostalgia. Fashion has raided the campus closet often enough to have earned several honorary degrees. Loro Piana avoids most of those clichés by making materiality the protagonist. Pecora Nera®, CashDenim®, suede, tweed, felted wool, and fine knitwear register against the tactile architecture around them. A weathered oak desk beside a richly textured jacket creates a conversation about surfaces; denim against carved paneling gives something utilitarian an unexpectedly cultivated context. The campaign doesn’t merely say heritage. It lets different forms of heritage sit beside one another.

Rock also finds welcome moments of irreverence within all that institutional gravitas. Models sit cross-legged on desks, lean against lecterns, perch on benches, stare absently through windows, and occupy the spaces with the languor of students who have become very comfortable with the timetable. Those gestures prevent the Sorbonne from becoming a museum. The strongest images suggest the building after class, when authority temporarily evaporates and the students inherit the room. There is a youthful nonchalance here that Loro Piana can benefit from, particularly as the house continues to communicate its formidable craftsmanship to a generation less interested in conventional demonstrations of luxury.

The campaign is less convincing when the poses become too composed. Some of the more straightforward standing portraits beautifully communicate silhouette and fabrication, but they sacrifice a little of the narrative charm found elsewhere. The environment is so evocative that one wants Rock to keep misbehaving with it. The image of Taverner collapsed alongside a bag on a wooden desk, for example, says considerably more than another immaculate portrait ever could. Luxury becomes more desirable when it appears to have a life rather than simply a price.

There is also an intriguing tension between the campaign’s premise and its location. “Back to School” is ostensibly about returning to everyday city life as summer fades, yet the Sorbonne carries centuries of cultural authority. Nothing about it is exactly everyday. But perhaps that contradiction is the point. Loro Piana has always specialized in making extraordinary materials behave as though they were the most natural things in the world. Cashmere becomes a cardigan. Rare fibers become a jacket. Exceptional craftsmanship becomes something you simply throw over your shoulders on the way out the door. Here, one of the world’s most storied universities becomes somewhere to sit around in jeans.

That ease may be the campaign’s most persuasive achievement. The clothes never appear precious despite the preciousness of their construction, and the setting never overwhelms them despite its historical weight. Rock understands that both the Sorbonne and Loro Piana have enough pedigree without needing to underline it in red ink. The images are warm, tactile, intelligent, and occasionally just bored enough to feel authentically collegiate.

For Fall 2026, Loro Piana has gone back to school and discovered that its strongest subject remains the one it already knows exceptionally well: material intelligence. The setting supplies the history, Rock supplies the atmosphere, and the clothes quietly demonstrate their credentials. No need to check the transcript. This one graduates with honors.