“There’s a theory in Silicon Valley,” says Luca Faloni, “that you should only ever start a company if you think you can make a product that’s 10 times better than your competitor.” Luca Faloni is not from Silicon Valley, of course. He’s from Italy, and more specifically Turin – a place that builds great cars and enjoys good coffee. It’s also the birthplace of 

, the great Italian style icon and industrial tycoon of the 20th century. Turin is a city where people get out of the cab a block earlier than they need to, Luca tells me, so nobody thinks them flash for getting in a cab in the first place. Moderate, discreet, exacting, the city is an original bastion of quiet luxury, perhaps, long before anyone thought we needed such a phrase.

“So I think that’s the wrong advice,” Luca says. “The better advice would be, if you think you can improve something even just five per cent, it’s worth it. You’re already improving the quality of humanity, of your customers’ lives, or of your neighbourhood in a small way.” Sitting in Luca’s shop on the King ’s Road for a coffee, and spending some time as he goes about a (fairly) normal day on the eve of his eponymous brand’s 10th birth- day, it’s hard not to agree with him. Luca Faloni, both the man and the brand, have not reinvented the wheel. Wheels, as Fiat and Alfa Romeo knew, were already pretty good. Cashmere jumpers, too. And linen shirts. But what if your linen shirt was just a bit better? What if your cashmere jumper was just a touch more refined and lovely? What if it was more refined and lovely and cost less than the highfalutin competitors? These are the considerations upon which the net happiness of humanity (or at least the section of humanity that saunters down the King’s Road) might well be improved.

Luca enjoying a cappucino with his Toy Maltipoo pup, Peekaboo.

It has been an impressive first decade for Luca Faloni. He is rightly looked on as one of the foremost entrepreneurs in the world of men’s style. As we set up to shoot some portraits of Luca (along with Peekaboo, his loyal Toy Maltipoo, who sports an oatmeal knitted jumper of his very own), a young student at LSE comes in to collect an order. Sporting an off-white Luca Faloni quarter zip, the student spots Luca on the other side of the store, asks for a quick picture with him, and then for some advice on starting his own venture. (Luca studied as a post-graduate in London himself, before working in consulting. When he was starting his own business, his grandmother said: “Are you serious about this?”.)

Smiling with a battle-hardened warmth, Luca tells the young man that, whatever he does, he should know that it will take time – success is always twice as slow as you think it’ll be. Time, he implies, is the great unseen product developer, the great idea-honer, the great marketer. “You learn about your product and the customer over time and it takes time to improve things. And then it also takes time to get brand awareness and it takes time to work out all the processes,” he tells me later on. Every day of the week Luca concentrates on one different area of the business – product, brand, marketing, team, growth, stores, etc. “Because I want everything to move forward a tiny bit each week. And the progress feels slow in that way, but then if you look back across a few years, you think, ‘OK, actually, we used to have only two categories. Now we have pretty much the whole world’. We didn’t used to have any stores, now we have 10. In the first year, only your two best friends bought your products, and that was as a favour, and they never even wore them,” he laughs. But then, one day, 10 years later, you spot Prince William and Prince Harry wearing your shirts and you think, ‘OK...’”

OK. This is classic Faloni understatement. The company, which started in 2014 with a single product – a leather bag – on its website, now has 10 stores: three in London, and one each in Milan, Paris, Munich, Stockholm, Zurich, New York and Miami. With 10 stores, 10 years, and hundreds of thousands of very happy customers, they come here for something that is simply better than the competitors: a very classic, unshowy Italian style, executed beautifully with exquisite materials in good quality. It is a formula so beautifully simple that a Silicon Valley evangelist might roll their eyes, but there’s a good chance they’d be rolling them in a Luca Faloni quarter-zip.		

The first day Luca put his website live, he says, he sold one bag. Then another bag a few days later. A handful in the first month, all to friends. Then they made some belts, and those sold a little quicker, and then some linen shirts. One day early on, an order came from someone who lived just round the corner from Luca, so he hand-delivered the package to the customer 15 minutes later. Naturally, the buyer was pretty surprised to get a personal shirt delivery from the company’s founder in less than the time it would take to get a Domino’s. They went for a coffee, and the customer was something of a mover-and-shaker in the polo community. That customer told a few friends at his polo club, who all bought shirts and told a few more friends. And then things steadily began to snowball from there.

“I realised you need to foster these moments,” says Luca. “If I didn’t deliver that shirt by hand, maybe we would not have got our first group of customers. You have to be there all the time and try to do things and eventually, somehow, a brand develops organically.” Luca began to target people who worked at Goldman Sachs with very specific Facebook advertising. He reasoned they were probably youngish, London-based, and enjoyed the finer things. Soon, the orders started to rack up for Goldman’s London headquarters. He did the same for the next big name investment bank on the list: Morgan Stanley. “Then, when that was a success, we added the consultancies.” And on and on, little by little, infiltrating the boardrooms and pubs of the City one by one.

The company now operates in many territories across the world, each with their own quirks and tastes. But all of his customers, he says, care about quality, and they come to the brand for a certain understatement and handsome simplicity. I used that term ‘quiet luxury’ before, and it’s one that’s sometimes applied to Luca Faloni and other brands similar to it these days. Luca is not sure it is a particularly useful term. To someone from Turin, it is superfluous, a tautology – why would luxurious things need to be loud anyway?

“Look, perhaps if you’re from LA, quiet luxury was a new concept to you a few years ago,” he says. “But if you grew up in Turin, there was nothing other than quiet luxury. That’s how you dress. That’s always been there. It’s not a trend. It’s the same with drinking coffee in the morning.

“Turin has played a great role in my taste. I wouldn’t be able to start a street brand,” he laughs. “But I can tell you if a cardigan in this shade of grey is better than in another shade. When I was growing up in Turin, I was friends with people that were from a low-income background as well as people that might own a bank. And what you will notice is that those two people behave the same and dress the same. The guy that owns the bank is very subtle. He doesn’t tell you he owns a bank, because that’s not how people are brought up in Turin.”		

Quiet luxury’s zeitgeisty peak came during the final season of 

that aired in early 2023, courtesy of the inheritance-chic looks of Kendall Roy – cashmere caps and suede jackets in 50 shades of brown – many of which were famously sourced from 

. I ask Luca about that other brand in particular, whose Open Walk shoes and butter-soft baseball caps in particular have become an almost parody-worthy staple of the 0.1 per cent style.

“I think there are a few brands, not only them, but also Zegna, Brunello Cucinelli, etc, that are great in quality,” he says. “They are doing quality Italian craftsmanship. Those brands became successful across a long period of time.” But they’re expensive, says Luca. A lot of their income still comes from a wholesale model, he explains – selling through third parties or concessions. This can pump the price of their items up a notch, because the third party in the transaction also has to make a margin. “Long story short, a traditional wholesale brand like that needs to price a product at eight times the cost or more. We can price it at three or three-and-a-half times the cost. Even if we produce items from the great artisans in Italy as they do, we can come to market with a better value for our customers. That’s one of the key elements of difference. And so I believe the brand you mentioned – they’re just overpriced,” he says with a mischievous smile.

I ask Luca what frustrates him most about the world of fashion and luxury. What does he think of it all after a decade in the business? “I think it’s a scam,” he says. “There are many brands out there that sell beautiful products, but they want you to believe, ‘Oh, this item is so scarce, this piece is so scarce, that’s why we sell it for 50 times what it’s worth.’ But in reality, it’s not scarce. That’s why they have 30 billion in revenue. If it was really so scarce, you wouldn’t have 30 billion in revenue, right?”		

He points to the anomalous rules that some luxury marques have concerning who can buy their items – gatekeeping policies that only let loyal customers get access to the most coveted designs. “So before you can buy this, you have to spend a total amount on the brand first. They want to limit access.”

Where does Luca see himself in another 10 years? Would he follow the path of many other brands like his and seek an acquisition by an LVMH or a Richemont? “No, and for a few reasons,” he says. “One is, I do believe once a brand sells out, whoever comes in, they come in to make money. And you can make money in a few ways, but mostly by increasing the margin and increasing the price, which is not good for the customer. Or you massively scale the brand by opening 200 locations. I don’t think it’s good for what we do.”	

Instead, he wants to stay independent, and own a number of sites that is manageable, which he can feasibly keep an eye on. “There’s nothing better than a restaurant run by the founder, is there? In Italy, we say ‘the eye of the owner makes the cow fat.’”

Casting his eyes around his shop, he continues. “I enjoy coming here and talking to customers. I enjoy improving the items, thinking how we can come up with a better product, a better service, better processes to make everything easier for the customer, for ourselves. It gets me up in the morning.” Equally, he says, he is largely indifferent to the huge windfall of cash that might come from a sale. “What do you do with the money? To be honest, you only have 30 days in a month, right? You only have two feet. You cannot wear 20 pairs of shoes at once. You cannot eat 10 meals a day.”		

I ask Luca what have been the most memorable moments of the last decade. Having Prince William and Prince Harry regularly sporting your shirts seems pretty remarkable. Cillian Murphy, Colin Firth, Tom Cruise, and David Beckham are also fans. And Bob Iger, Disney’s formidable CEO (“This is my idol!”). And Tom Brady, too.	

“When we walk down Pavilion Road and see someone wearing a Luca Faloni hoodie – to me, that’s exciting,” he says. “You don’t want to tailor only to the 0.1 per cent. So seeing a real customer wearing a polo – that’s the thing that makes me think, “OK...”

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