MILAN — Anyone suggesting that Loro Piana’s ability to source some of the finest and most luxurious fibers across the world is just the result of great dealmaking skills would be proven wrong by Pier Luigi Loro Piana.

The deputy chairman of his namesake company argues that it is rather the reflection of the Italian luxury brand’s continued community-building efforts and shared research of excellence with its suppliers.

Cue the annual Record Bale Award, established in 1997 and driving his and the brand’s quest for increasingly finer merino wool fibers every year.

“The original concept that got us started in 1997 has been honored throughout these years and hasn’t changed,” said Loro Piana, deputy chairman of his namesake company, which has been controlled by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton since 2013.

“It’s always been about bringing together, under one roof, spinners, textile makers and our discerning clients to show them how our products are made,” he said.

The award is bestowed on the two farms, one in Australia and one in New Zealand, that have successfully produced the finest bale of merino wool in the previous year.

“We have incentivized breeders to pursue quality through an important recognition, which brings about a wealth of prestige,” Loro Piana offered. “Farmers who have accepted the challenge in New Zealand and Australia got passionate about it, and have benefited from the award,” he said.

“The Record Bale award celebrates the hard work of truly exceptional breeders with passion and innovation at the heart of their approach. It challenges them to continuously strive for excellence and enables us to create unique masterpieces together for the most discerning connoisseurs,” echoed Damien Bertrand, chief executive officer of Loro Piana. As reported, he is to officially pass the CEO baton to Frédéric Arnault on June 10 to become deputy CEO of Louis Vuitton.

The award ceremony, held Wednesday night at the San Francisco City Hall, drew personalities from the Silicon Valley gotha, including Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google; Alan Dye and Eddy Cue, respectively Apple’s vice president of human interface design and senior vice president of services; Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer at Meta; Mira Murati, former CTO at OpenAI and founder of Thinking Machines Lab; as well as philanthropist Vanessa Getty and the Italian Consul General Sergio Strozzi, in addition to Loro Piana, Bertrand and Arnault.

The awards recognized the achievements of the Australian farm Pyrenees Park and the New Zealand Visuela Farm.

Both were also the winners in the previous two years and Loro Piana underscored how there are about four to six farms across the two countries which can manage to obtain merino wools between 10 and 11 microns.

“One should not be surprised that there are so few breeders really competing for the awards. All the other farms working to produce fibers around 12 or 12.5 microns are many more and we hope that those, too, will be triggered to climb to the top,” he said, likening the Record Bale Award to the America’s Cup in that it fuels both domestic and international competition.

Pamela, Robert and Bradley Sandlant of the Australian Pyrenees Park farm scooped up the award with a merino wool fiber of 10.5 microns. The same farm won last year’s award with a 10.2-micron fiber which secured them the new World Record Bale, surpassing the 2013 record of 10.3 microns.

A micron is the unit of measurement of the fineness of a fiber equivalent to one-thousandth of a millimeter. For context, a human hair measures 80 microns.

The New Zealand 2024 Loro Piana Record Bale Award went to the Visuela Farm, managed by Ivonne and Barrie Payne, which achieved a micron count of 10.8, slightly below last year’s winning bale — also obtained by the same farm — which boasted a 10.7 microns fineness.

Even the most skilled breeders, such as the winners, do not necessarily manage to outdo themselves every year, Loro Piana explained. The level of fineness depends also on weather conditions and the ability to control individual sheep and their fleeces.

The first award was bestowed on New Zealand’s wool breeder Donald Burnett from the farm Mount Cook Station. It weighed 100 kg and measured 13.7 microns, which means the fiber’s fineness has improved by more than 30 percent.

“In about 30 years, which is a short timeframe, the fineness has improved significantly thanks to a painstaking selection for the best and finest wools,” Loro Piana offered.

The World Record Bale is preciously stored in a glass container at the Loro Piana Quarona factory in Italy’s Piedmont region, until the record is beaten and the previous award-winning bale is spun into the ultrafine The Gift of Kings wool, then plied into a lineup of garments bearing the same moniker.

The name is inspired by the Spanish royal family’s practice of gifting pairs of merino sheep to other monarchs to honor its relationships. In the second half of the 18th century, the animals were taken to New Zealand and Australia, where the habitat proved ideal.

“We have the great advantage of scooping up the finest bales every year and the farms’ entire production… and channel them into a category of garments that did not exist before the creation of the Record Bale Award,” Loro Piana explained.

“We’re not animated by the prospect of making business on the about 100 garments crafted from the Record Bale Award fibers, but rather to trigger breeders to enhance the quality and fineness of their flocks and recognize wool as one of the rarest natural fibers, similarly to vicuna and cashmere,” he said.  

For context, this year’s recipients of the two awards managed to produce merino wool that is finer than the best vicuna, Loro Piana said.

The precious Record Bale garments are differentiated with a special label that documents their traceability, from the year the animal was shorn, to its origin, to the fiber’s micron.

Over the years The Gift of Kings lineup has become a collectible range.

“Collectors, and quality-maniac clients, want to own the year’s best products, like a vintage wine,” Loro Piana said. “They want to secure a garment crafted from the Record Bale every year and make a collection of them,” he said.

“It’s easy [to get passionate about it], it’s a tactile experience. When you wear a suit that is 12-micron-fine or even finer it gives you a feeling that it’s hard to forget,” he offered.

The award ceremonies have been held around the world, from New York, Tokyo and Los Angeles to Rome, Milan, and, most recently, in London.