Fashion · Italian Craft
A maison’s quiet bet on the next generation of hands
Few luxury houses talk less about craft than the ones that actually have it. Loro Piana belongs to that quieter category, and the Knit Design Award has become one of the most considered ways the maison makes its argument. Now in its tenth anniversary edition, the competition gathered eight of the world’s leading fashion schools in Milan this week under a single brief: Knitting Light, Craft on the Evolution of Colour.
The 2026 edition, judged on May 13th and announced on May 14th at Galleria Rossana Orlandi, named The Swedish School of Textiles as its winner, with master’s students Halla Lilja Armannsdottir and Viola Schmidt taking the award for their project Glitsky, Mother of Pearl.
The Winners
Cashmere meeting iridescence
Halla Lilja Armannsdottir and Viola Schmidt, master’s students at The Swedish School of Textiles, took this year’s prize with Glitsky, Mother of Pearl, a project drawn from the way sunlight strikes crystallised clouds. The garment is modular, with diamond motifs that attach and detach through a linking system built into the knitted shapes themselves.
The Brief
Colour as a form of evidence
This year’s theme asked the students to work with the world’s finest cashmere, blended with innovative fibres, and shape a convertible garment that captured the transformation of colour through light. It is the kind of brief that sounds abstract until you understand what Loro Piana is really asking. Knitwear, more than almost any other fashion category, only reveals itself in the hand, the wear, the weight.
The brief was technical, but the question underneath it was philosophical: can young designers still hear what a yarn is doing? The winning piece is structured on the outside, reflective beneath, and the colour shifts with the angle of the wearer.
The Jury
A room that takes the question seriously
The jury was chaired by Loro Piana CEO Frederic Arnault and assembled an unusually serious lineup for a student award: Anna Dello Russo, Sara Sozzani Maino of Fondazione Sozzani and Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, the creative director Edward Buchanan, the editor and creative director Nick Vinson, fashion critic Leaf Greener, SETCHU founder Satoshi Kuwata, and gallerist Rossana Orlandi.
Eight schools competed in this anniversary edition. The number of participating institutions has more than doubled since the inaugural year, from three to eight, a trajectory that says something about how seriously the fashion academy now takes knitwear as a discipline.
Glitsky, Mother of Pearl
The winning piece, up close
The winners will now complete their design inside Loro Piana’s own yarn and knitwear ateliers in Piedmont, working alongside the artisans who have spent careers there. The finished piece will be unveiled at the Loro Piana booth at Pitti Filati, the leading global trade event for yarns, in Florence from 24 to 26 June.
The Eight Schools
Eight visions, one yarn
If the brief was philosophical, the responses were extraordinarily varied. Eight schools, eight readings of what colour means when it is held in cashmere. Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo drew on Junichiro Tanizaki’s essay In Praise of Shadows, treating darkness not as the absence of light but as the condition that makes light visible. Their piece works the relationship between negative space and luminosity into the surface of the knit.
Accademia Costume and Moda
My Wondering Creature
Rome’s Accademia Costume and Moda submitted My Wondering Creature, a project that imagines a third identity formed at the meeting point of Pinocchio and the Tin Can Man. Cashmere carries the softness of one figure, metal threads the structure and tension of the other. The garment becomes transformable, designed to express the moment two materials, and two stories, find a shared language.
Parsons School of Design
Lichtspiel, light at play
Parsons sent Lichtspiel, a meditation on the northern lights translated into the language of tide and sail. Caitlin Briare and Carolin Habermann built their own melange and mouline yarns to capture the colour shifts of aurora, integrating a fishing-net system into the skirt and sleeves that adjusts the garment’s length through pulled threads. The result is a piece that moves the way water moves, with the wearer.
Donghua University in Shanghai presented Sailing, a maritime narrative in blue and white stripes. Ecole Duperre Paris contributed Nuit Blanche, a study of screen light bleeding into the intimate space of the bedroom. Heriot Watt University brought Second Form, a project on body dysmorphia worked into knit. Shih Chien University offered Back Home, Formosa, a love letter to Taiwan in mountain and sea hues. Each school approached the same yarn from a different angle of light.
For Boujeez
A thesis written in cashmere
For Boujeez, the significance of the Knit Design Award is less about who won and more about what it represents in the current luxury landscape. As the industry navigates a difficult moment of churn, outsourcing scrutiny, and creative director rotation, Loro Piana’s tenth anniversary edition reads as a counter-position. Ten years of investing in students at fashion schools is not a marketing programme. It is a thesis: that the future of luxury depends on the survival of craft, and that craft only survives if it is passed on.
The award is one of the few institutional answers to that thesis the industry has produced. Quietly, year after year, Loro Piana has been making the case in cashmere.