The Wool That Costs as Much as a Birkin
The jewel in Loro Piana’s crown: vicuna, the world’s rarest animal fibre, for the brand’s softest and most luxurious knits.
When Loro Piana says it won’t compromise on quality, it doesn’t say this lightly. It goes directly to the sources in China and Mongolia for topgrade cashmere and baby cashmere (the latter comes only from one-year-old goats). The 93-yearold Italian brand also has long-term agreements with breeders in Australia and New Zealand to purchase their finest merino wool, which Loro Piana has trademarked as “The Gift of Kings”. At the company’s facilities in Italy, the precious fibres are transformed into the luxurious knitwear the brand is most known for. But it isn’t only famous for its cashmere and wool; it is also highly regarded for the much less well-known vicuna (both the animal and the fibre). Loro Piana is the company that most significantly contributed to the recovery of local populations of the Andes-dwelling, doe-eyed camelid. Prized for its fleece, the vicuna was at one point hunted to nearextinction – numbers fell below 5,000 in the ’60s. In 2008, the company established the Dr Franco Loro Piana Reserve (named after the father of the brand’s founder, Pietro) on the Peruvian Andes to protect the animals from poachers. On the 2,000ha land (bigger than 2,400 football fields), vicunas roam freely under the villagers’ watchful eyes, and are corralled only once in two years to be sheared in an ancient Incan ritual called chaccu. What makes vicuna so precious? In the harsh conditions of the Andes, the diminutive animals develop a short, dense and exceptionally fine underfleece that yields fibres with remarkable thermoregulating properties. In the biennial shearing ritual, each adult animal provides just 250g of hair. After removing the coarser hairs, only 120-150g is left of the extremely rare fibre that is incomparably light, soft, yet warm. This is spun, woven and crafted in Italy into Loro Piana’s luxurious offerings, which cost from $7,800 for a 100 per cent vicuna stole to more than $32,000 for a part-vicuna cape. – RT