Invisible Dynamics

An organisation can know an extraordinary amount about the quality of its products while knowing much less about the conditions in which they are made. Loro Piana offers a concrete starting point for examining this gap. At its 2025 exhibition in Shanghai, the maison presented a space dedicated to quality control, with Baby Cashmere shown under a microscope magnifying the fibre 35,000 times. It was a striking representation of the attention given to the material. In July 2025,

Jacqueline de Ribes was remembered as one of the most elegant women in France. But elegance may be the least interesting part of her story. Born into aristocracy, married at eighteen into a conservative family and celebrated first as a muse, she inhabited a world in which identity arrived almost fully designed. There were codes to respect, expectations to embody and boundaries that a woman of her position was not supposed to cross. Yet de Ribes did not simply wear what her wo

What happens when we become more accustomed to seeing ourselves than to feeling ourselves? There was a time when a mirror was one of the few places where we could encounter our own image. We looked, adjusted something, and walked away. Today, our image rarely leaves us. We photograph ourselves. We film ourselves. We select, crop, correct, publish, observe reactions and, sometimes almost unconsciously, begin to imagine how a moment will look before we have fully lived it. Some