Loro Piana never set out to make shoes. For a hundred years it has been something rarer than a cobbler, the finest fabric house in the world. Founded in 1924 in Quarona, a small town in the Piedmontese Alps, the firm built its name sourcing the most precious fibres on earth: vicuña from the high Andes, baby cashmere combed from goat kids in Inner Mongolia, the softest merino money can buy. Loro Piana made the cloth other great houses bought. So when it finally put its name on a shoe, it did the only thing it knows how to do, it started with the softest material in the room and refused to shout about any of it.
A shoe that arrived before its moment
The Summer Walk appeared in 2005, and for a long time almost no one noticed. It was an unlined slip-on built for warm weather and unhurried days, a boat off Portofino, a long lunch that ran into the evening, rather than for the office or the pavement. For over a decade it stayed an insider’s shoe, the kind of thing you clocked on a certain sort of man in a certain sort of place and nowhere else. It sold quietly, to people who already knew.
Then the wider world caught up. Somewhere around the end of the 2010s, fashion rediscovered the pleasure of clothes that whisper, gave it a name, “quiet luxury”, and went looking for its emblem. The Summer Walk was waiting. It picked up a nickname it never asked for, the billionaire loafer, and a shoe designed to be overlooked became, paradoxically, one of the most recognised in menswear.
Why it feels the way it feels
Pick one up and the appeal is obvious in the hand before it is ever on the foot. The upper is soft deerskin or suede, unlined, so it has no stiff internal structure to break in, it simply moulds to your foot like a second skin over the first few wears. The apron is stitched by hand at the toe. Underneath sits a pebbled gum-rubber sole embossed with the Loro Piana name, the one concession to practicality that turns a house slipper into a shoe you can actually walk in. It is made in Italy, and the craft is real, even if the house says very little about it.
The genius is the restraint. There is no hardware, no buckle, no logo you could read across a room, no polish to keep up. It looks like a slipper and wears like a moccasin, and the entire point is that it disappears. That is a difficult thing to design and an even harder thing to sell, which is precisely why so few have managed it.
It looks like a slipper and wears like a moccasin, and the whole point is that it disappears.
The name is the philosophy
Two words carry the entire idea. Not a march, not a commute, not a walk to anywhere in particular, a summer walk. The name describes a pace, and the shoe is built to keep it: soft enough to wear without socks, light enough to forget, easy enough that putting it on feels like the opposite of getting dressed. Everything the shoe is about is contained in the refusal to hurry.
If you want one
Off the rack, a pair runs from around $725 to a little over $1,000, with exotic skins and custom orders climbing into the thousands, Loro Piana will take you past $14,000 if you let it. Buy a quiet color first: a soft navy, a stone, a tobacco suede. Wear it on a bare ankle with a cropped trouser or with soft, unstructured tailoring, and never with anything that is trying hard. Know the trade you are making, too: the softness that makes the shoe also means it creases, and the sole is not built to fight city pavements forever. It is a shoe for pleasure, not punishment. Bought in that spirit, it is one of the few genuinely luxurious things that never once asks to be noticed.
If you would like to see the current range, Loro Piana’s own Summer Walk is the place to start, and Gentleman’s Gazette has the most level-headed review of whether it is worth the money.
Shop the Loro Piana Summer Walk ↗
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