Loro Piana (clothing) ★

What you are paying for

Two things, in unequal proportion: the fibre, which is genuinely scarce and genuinely expensive, and the brand, which is very expensive indeed. A cashmere sweater from a good knitter using comparable yarn costs considerably less.

The honest position is that the vicuña and baby cashmere products are hard to obtain elsewhere at all, and the ordinary cashmere and wool products are not.

What to buy and what to skip

The case for the vicuña and baby cashmere products is supply: they are difficult to obtain anywhere else at a comparable standard, because the company controls the fibre. The case for the ordinary cashmere knitwear is weaker, because a good Scottish or Italian knitter using comparable yarn charges considerably less.

The outerwear (the Storm System coats, the cashmere and vicuña overcoats) occupies the middle: genuinely well made, genuinely expensive, and with real technical content in the water-resistant treatments.

The quietest expensive clothes made

The clothing line's discipline is that it does almost nothing visible: no pattern, no hardware, no logo, and colours that avoid attention. What it spends money on is fibre, and the whole proposition depends on the buyer being able to tell the difference by touch. That makes it the purest test case for whether fibre quality is worth paying for, and the honest answer is that it is audible in the hand and largely invisible at three paces.