Loro Piana sets fall campaign in Houston’s Menil Collection, Rothko Chapel

Loro Piana set its fall-winter 2026-2027 campaign inside three of Houston’s most disciplined cultural spaces: the Menil Collection, the de Menil residence and Rothko Chapel. Photographed by Mario Sorrenti, the campaign also cast U.S. saxophonist Richard “Dickie” Landry, a figure long connected to the de Menil circle, and treated the city’s art institutions as the quietest possible runway.

The brand has framed the project as part of its ongoing search for “singular places,” and the setting does the heavy lifting. Instead of staging cashmere and tailoring against the usual scenery of yachts, penthouses or aspirational resort light, Loro Piana placed the clothes inside rooms designed for contemplation, where pale walls, shadow and silence matter as much as fabric. The house said the imagery was meant to capture “natural, unforced beauty” and a “quiet dialogue” between clothes and place, a brief that lands differently when the backdrop is a museum, a private residence and a chapel.

The choice of Houston carries its own cultural weight. John and Dominique de Menil founded the Menil Foundation in 1954, and the Menil Collection’s main building opened to the public in 1987. The nearby Rothko Chapel opened on February 27, 1971, after John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko’s ensemble of paintings in April 1964. Those dates matter because they explain why the campus still reads less like an ordinary museum district than a carefully composed vision of patronage, art and architecture.

Loro Piana is also putting money behind that legacy. The brand is supporting the Menil Collection ahead of its 40th Anniversary Gala in December 2027 and contributing to Rothko Chapel’s Opening Spaces project, a major campus expansion intended to preserve the site as a sacred art space while adding green space. Recent reporting has placed the project at roughly $42 million to $51 million, depending on phase and timing. The Menil has also said the repurposed Fresco Building, formerly the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum, is slated to reopen in 2027, alongside restoration of the de Menil House and renovation of the Menil Bookstore.

For Loro Piana, the signal is clear. The label is not chasing spectacle so much as borrowing the gravity of institutions built on discretion, collecting and slow cultural memory, and that is exactly where its ideal customer wants luxury to live.