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Pecunia animal5/10/2023 "Per kilo, vicuña costs between $399 to $600, compared to $75 to $85 for cashmere and $5 or $6 for wool," says Pascaline Wilhelm, fashion director of Première Vision, the Parisian textiles and fabric fair. Today, the total global supply of vicuña wool produced annually that can be transformed into yarn is only about 12 tonnes, compared to approximately 25,000 tonnes of cashmere. "Since then, we sourced a lot of vicuña that was officially sheared, and researched ways that we could develop a variety of items in new product categories to develop the possibility of a market for it here." By 1994, their foresight paid off when The Washington Convention relaxed its restrictions and the Peruvian government chose Loro Piana as its exclusive partner in the procurement, processing and export of vicuña in the form of fabric and finished products. "We worked pretty hard in the '80s and early '90s to make that happen," he says of his and his late brother's efforts to get vicuña back on the market. "We worked a lot to reintroduce vicuña to the commercial world," says Pier Luigi Loro Piana, vice president of his family's eponymous brand, which became actively involved with the Peruvian authorities by officially investing in nature reserves and preservation initiatives in the mid-1980s. Per kilo, raw vicuña can fetch up to six times more than cashmere | Source: Courtesy Per kilo, raw vicuña can fetch up to six times more than cashmere | Source: Courtesy Per kilo, raw vicuña can fetch up to six times more than cashmere | Source: Courtesy But a couple of vicuña admirers, inspired by their father’s love of the fibre, saw opportunity in the material: Sergio and Pier Luigi Loro Piana, the co-CEOs of Loro Piana, the Italian mill that was a part of the mid-century ‘Made in Italy’ movement and would eventually grow into one of the world’s largest producers of cashmere - and its biggest supplier of vicuña. Nature reserves were established for the preservation of the animals, and slowly vicuña became less relevant to a younger generation of luxury consumers. After many unsuccessful attempts, the government of Peru, where much of the population lived, put its proverbial foot down and banned the hunting of the species, which were soon classified as officially endangered with an embargo placed on all trade of its wool by The Washington Convention (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora). The other was a scene in the 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard,” in which a tailor urges American actor William Holden, “As long as the lady is paying, why not take the vicuña?”īoth of those moments did much to reinforce the expensive allure of vicuña wool, which, by 1960, was incredibly scarce due to the fact that there were less than 5,000 of the creatures left in the Andes. The case would become known as the Vicuña Coat Affair. The more notable related to a scandal concerning Sherman Adams, US president Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, who was forced to resign in 1958 after accepting a vicuña overcoat from a textile mogul who was under federal investigation. And, for centuries, the animals were hunted, rather than sheared, for a material substantially finer than cashmere.īy the 1950s, vicuña had become synonymous with two pop cultural references. About three million vicuña once roamed the rocky terrains of the Andes - until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors, who made guns the primary method of obtaining "the silk of the new world" which was used to line King Philip II's divans. Only Inca royalty was permitted to wear it. The doe-eyed creatures, which inhabit the chilly Andean plateaus, produce a fleece so fine that it was considered to be cloth of gold. ALTIPLANO, Peru - There's a reason why the Incas worshipped vicuña, the miniature cinnamon-hued cousins of the llama.
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