Why we chose them
Records dating back to 1623 name members of the Piacenza family as wool merchants, before it became a recognized “lanificio”. Officially founded in 1733 in Pollone, at the foot of the Alps in the Biella textile district, Fratelli Piacenza has earned its provenance. The fourteenth generation still operates its family’s iconic mill, and it’s formally a recognized member of the Henokiens. The international association is reserved for family businesses at least 200 years old. That alone deserves respect.
But Piacenza carries more than just the weight of their family’s heritage. Those centuries were spent not just building a business, a mill with a recognized name, but they were spent learning how to find, select, and transform exceptional animal fibres into the best textiles possible by venturing out to find and understand them first-hand. Wool was the beginning. Cashmere, camelhair, alpaca, and eventually vicuña joined the repertoire, adding to an obsession with excellence and the never-ending quest not only to source, but to cultivate the best.
Members of the Piacenza family were unusually adventurous in pursuing this passion. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mario and Guido Piacenza travelled through regions that were extraordinarily difficult for Europeans to reach. But that was where these animals lived and demanded that they venture to encounter these rare fibres, straight to the source, and so they did. Mario's encounters in the Middle East exposed him to camel down; during a 1913 Himalayan expedition, he first encountered its insulating properties after interacting with local Sherpas. You have to understand these weren’t marketing expeditions invented retrospectively. They were genuine stories about how the family gained first-hand knowledge about these fibres that other European textile manufacturers were only beginning to understand, and never could, in the same way.
The mill works with cashmere, vicuña, camelhair, alpaca, mohair, fine wool, silk, and combinations of these fibres, giving it an unusually broad understanding of how these raw materials behave through spinning, weaving and finishing. Piacenza's contemporary fabric business continues to supply high-end fashion houses, tailors and clothing manufacturers rather than existing principally as a consumer luxury label. Piacenza stands adamantly firm in refusing to let efficiency replace craft. They remain one of the last mills still practicing thistle raising by hand, where dried teasel flowers are mounted in wooden frames, and then used to lift the nap of a cloth by being drawn against it repeatedly. It’s a much gentler and slower technique than any steel-toothed machine, and one that leaves the materials soft and downy in a way modernized shortcuts quite literally can’t touch. It also operates in Biella, where the water and specific mineral content naturally contribute to the softness and hand of a material undergoing the last stages of finishing. Many of the world's top luxury mills remain in Biella for this reason. As a result, Piacenza is known for finishing techniques that preserve loft while creating remarkable handfeel. Its control over the materials it works with is critical to the result.
These are the sorts of details luxury enthusiasts obsess over because it is difficult to replicate with modern industrial shortcuts. However, to remain cutting-edge and competitive, the company has repeatedly invested in modern machinery while maintaining traditional finishing methods. Long-term family ownership allows them to make investments that publicly traded companies often avoid. That is where Piacenza holds real value. And after almost three hundred years, that remains the company's point. Piacenza does not make textiles valuable because its name is attached to them. The name became valuable because generations of this family learned how to recognize exceptional fibres and, more importantly, what to do with them once they were successfully searched out and discovered.
