Loro Piana’s Houston Campaign Finds Its Setting in the Menil World
Loro Piana has turned to one of Houston’s most distinctive art environments for its fall/winter 2026 campaign, photographing the collection at the Menil Collection, the private de Menil residence, and Rothko Chapel. The result is less a conventional fashion shoot than a study in how clothing can be staged inside a carefully preserved cultural landscape.
The Italian luxury brand approached the Menil Collection last fall, and Mario Sorrenti shot the campaign over four days this spring. The teaser images place coats, trousers, sweaters, and dresses alongside artworks and furnishings associated with the de Menil family, including pieces by Tomás Yepes, Francesca Fuchs, Wayne Thiebaud, and Mark Rothko.
The settings themselves carry considerable weight. The de Menil residence, designed by Philip Johnson and built in 1948 after John and Dominique de Menil immigrated from Europe to Houston, is not open to the public. Its interiors appear in the campaign as lived-in, highly specific spaces: a 19th-century green silk setee in the entryway, alabaster lamps bought at a Houston flea market in 1951, and a glassed-in atrium filled with tropical plants, a feature shaped by the couple’s time in Venezuela.
Rothko Chapel, meanwhile, offers a different kind of visual gravity. Opened in 1971, seven years after the de Menils commissioned Rothko to create 14 canvases for the non-denominational space, the chapel remains one of the most resonant intersections of modern art and contemplation in the United States. In a 1966 letter to the de Menils, Rothko wrote that the commission was teaching him “to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me.”
The campaign also folds in the Menil Collection’s broader domestic and artistic history. One image shows model Sigrid de L’Epine in the residence’s entryway; another places Long Li near Francesca Fuchs’s Venus and Wayne Thiebaud’s Lipstick and Compact. A dining room scene includes Tomás Yepes’s Four Vases of Flowers in a Niche and Fuchs’s Magenta Ernst, a work made for the recent exhibition “The Space Between Looking and Loving.”
For a fashion house known for restraint and material refinement, the choice of Houston is telling. Here, luxury is framed not as spectacle, but as proximity to art, architecture, and the private histories that shaped both.
