Why we chose them
In 1733, Pietro Francesco Piacenza began weaving wool in Pollone, a small town in the foothills of the Biella Alps that has been Italy's textile heartland for centuries. Nearly three hundred years and fourteen generations later, the Piacenza family still owns and runs the mill themselves — one of a handful of companies in the world old and continuously family-held enough to belong to Les Henokiens, the society reserved for businesses that have survived 200 years under one family's stewardship.
What has kept them there is a refusal to let efficiency replace craft. Piacenza is among the last mills anywhere still practising thistle raising by hand: dried teasel flowers, mounted in wooden frames, are drawn again and again across the face of a finished cloth to lift its nap — a technique gentler and slower than any steel-toothed machine, and one that leaves cashmere and vicuña with a softness no shortcut can match. Their vicuña, rarer and finer than either cashmere or true wool, is hand-selected by the Piacenza family themselves at source in Arequipa and Ayacucho, high in the Peruvian Andes, through direct agreements with the communities who shear it.
Archibald turns to Piacenza for the pieces where softness has to be the whole point — our cashmere knitwear, scarves and throws, and the vicuña scarves and stoles reserved for our rarest offering. It is a partnership built on the same instinct that built Piacenza's: that some things are only worth doing if you refuse to rush them.
