Soft power: 10 years of Luca Faloni

“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 Gianni Agnelli, 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.