🚀 go-pugleaf

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fv6LQZnoIfU/Um_MK3E3ZbI/AAAAAAAAMVA/uzJBNoSB3cU/s1600/vicuna.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fv6LQZnoIfU/Um_MK3E3ZbI/AAAAAAAAMVA/uzJBNoSB3cU/s400/vicuna.jpg" width="372" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>When a book says that it was edited by a brand’s “marketing communication” department I don’t expect much.  However, the recent publication of Loro Piana’s <i>Vicuña: The Queen of the Andes</i> offers a pleasant opportunity to learn more about the near-mythical fiber, and to reflect a bit on its myth and reality.<br /><br /> In form and substance, <i>Vicuña: The Queen of the Andes</i> follows two other Loro Piana books, <i>The Lotus Flower: A Textile Hidden in the Water</i> and <i>Baby Cashmere: The Long Journey of Excellence</i>. Like those two, it’s a large coffee table-size book describing the exotic delights of a very rare fiber carefully harvested according to ancient traditional folkways, featuring extensive photography by Bruna Rotunno of the locales, the people, the process and the animals or (in the case of <i>The Lotus Flower</i>) the plants at the source of the material.  As with the earlier books, Rotunno’s photographs effectively convey the stunning remoteness of the hardscrabble environments where some of the finest fibers on the planet are to be discovered.  Like cashmere goats, the vicuña owes its softness to the extremely fine fibers of its undercoat, which have to insulate it in punishing cold and summer heat.  The smallest member of the camelid family, the vicuña also makes a knockout subject for Rotunno’s camera, resembling artists’ conceptions of the Dahou or Sidehill Hoofer of folklore with its enormous, twinkling eyes, babyfaced, half-smiling snout, slender neck and graceful back.  Never domesticated, vicuñas roam the mountains of Peru and Argentina.  Again as with cashmere goats, my understanding is that it would be impossible to cultivate them for their wool in more hospitable areas as its fineness depends on exposure to those extremes.<br /><br /> The history of vicuña wool is inextricably bound up with exoticism, colonial and postcolonial rapacity, and current ecological concerns through a sort of latter-day sybaritic sustainable development.  Both <i>Vicuña: The Queen of the Andes</i> and Meg Lukens Noonan’s recent <i><a href="http://asuitablewardrobe.dynend.com/2013/07/book-review-coat-route.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Coat Route</a></i> take pains to inform us that the indigenous populations of the region treated the vicuña as sacred, gently shearing and releasing the animals in a ceremony involving a huge human chain that would tighten around them until they had nowhere to go.  Only royalty could wear its cloth, spun by specially chosen maidens in a way that almost anticipated the marketingspeak of centuries later.  The Spanish conquistadors discovered the cloth and, more impatient than the Inca, decimated the vicuña population in order to harvest as much of its wool as possible.  In the ensuing centuries, the popular wisdom held that (as a wild animal) the vicuña could only be shorn when hunted and killed.  As a result, populations and supply stayed low and prices high, so that by the 1950s vicuña had become synonymous with a morally suspect and unmasculine self-indulgence, offered to William Holden “as long as the lady’s paying” in Sunset Boulevard, bringing down an official in the Eisenhower administration who accepted a gift of a vicuña coat, and appearing under the Anderson & Sheppard jacket of Count Lippe, a Bond villain “with the yellow streak of the man who lives on women” in Thunderball.  Dr. Franco Loro Piana, father of the current brothers who ran Loro Piana until recently, dealt in vicuña then, and <a href="http://asuitablewardrobe.dynend.com/2013/07/limit-your-exposure.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">my own vicuña</a>, acquired vintage of course, dates from that time, the pre-ban period, though not from that maker.<br /><br /> It wasn’t until 1976 and near-extinction that the vicuña obtained protection.  Restrictions were finally eased in 1994.  Loro Piana triumphantly emphasizes that, following its establishment of protected reserves and reintroduction of traditional and humane shearing practices, it now has rights of first refusal to the entire vicuña fiber production of Peru.  It is also establishing similar reserves in Argentina for the vicuña there, whose fiber is even lighter.  A special “Vicuña Peru” logo now goes on all new legally harvested Peruvian vicuña, some of which will have come from vicuña who flock through a reserve named for the Loro Pianas’ late father.  The harvest, atavistically patterned after the ancient Inca chaccu ceremony, takes place only every two years, with shearing by hand.  The book leaves the reader with the impression that the ancient myths of near-divine purity that accompanied the vicuña have been revived.  One can only imagine what Loro Piana’s new owner, LVMH, of legendary rapacity, will do with these myths and the delicate realities of the vicuña today.<br /><br />Luxury brands deal in myth, in stories that could have been composed by ancient troubadours, familiar only at a distance with their subjects.  At such a distance, myths and <i>chansons de geste</i> tend to amplify themselves with each telling, just like internet received wisdom today.  Today, brands also get to use science and throw figures around: <i>Vicuña: The Queen of the Andes</i> and <i>Baby Cashmere: The Long Journey of Excellence</i> tell us that vicuña fiber is 12 to 13 microns in diameter (a micron being a millionth of a meter, since you were about to Google it), baby cashmere 13 microns, and normal cashmere 15 microns, before taking into account the differences in the structure of the fiber that supposedly render vicuña even warmer than cashmere.<br /><br /> It is easy to exoticize what we don’t have personal experience with.  However, a friend I’ll call <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide#Secondary_characters" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Signor Pococurante</a>, a man of wealth and taste like our mutual e-friend voxsartoria, once observed, “Vicuna just feels like a really nice, warm cashmere. It is not some secret fabric with totally different properties.”  My personal experience with pre-ban vicuña from some of the very best knitters tends to confirm this – it’s lovely to handle, but not the dazzling life-changing experience today’s troubadours would have us believe.  The nap of my alleged vicuña robe is incredibly soft, but I try not to keep stroking parts of my clothing when others are present.<br /><br /> The myth is out there.  You can tell by the strange forms vicuña has taken.  I’ve seen a Marinella tie in certified new vicuña, in the plain tan color associated with vicuña, a difficult tie color which must only be for convincing and impressing other crass <i>Robb Report</i>-reading sugar daddies and the women who pretend to love them.  A vicuña dressing gown that didn’t sell held pride of place at Selfridges back around the beginning of the Great Recession.  At 20,000 pounds, it must have been there only to start conversation.<br /><br /> Contra Aesop, familiarity need not breed contempt, but mythical luxury fibers need unfamiliarity to thrive, which is why we have these books on vicuña, baby cashmere and carefully hand-untangled lotus fiber (which is embargoed in the United States as Loro Piana’s stuff comes from Myanmar).  For some years, even more obscure cryptids have crept into the dream menagerie, among them guanaco (a relative of vicuña) and qiviuk, which is so rare no two publications appear to spell its name the same way, like with Qaddafi.  It’s easier to spin a figurative yarn that gets the attention of new customers than to spin good real yarn and knit it well.  I give Loro Piana props for its conservation work and its beautiful books, and hope the brave little animal has a future.<br /><br />In any event, based on my experience, I would never pay the retail amounts being asked for new vicuña, although I was glad to pay the painfully high prices of the late knitters who made the best, densest cashmere sweaters (as well as one of my vicuña sweaters).  There is a virtue in doing something well, and a virtue, on a purchaser’s part, in recognizing the value of that without the distraction of fashion’s neophilia.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: right;">Words by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans</div><div class="feedflare">
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=IJ1RjZMSkOM:SzEj8ap0t1Y:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=IJ1RjZMSkOM:SzEj8ap0t1Y:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=IJ1RjZMSkOM:SzEj8ap0t1Y:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?i=IJ1RjZMSkOM:SzEj8ap0t1Y:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=IJ1RjZMSkOM:SzEj8ap0t1Y:4cEx4HpKnUU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?i=IJ1RjZMSkOM:SzEj8ap0t1Y:4cEx4HpKnUU" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?a=IJ1RjZMSkOM:SzEj8ap0t1Y:63t7Ie-LG7Y"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/ASuitableWardrobe?d=63t7Ie-LG7Y" border="0"></img></a>
</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ASuitableWardrobe/~4/IJ1RjZMSkOM" height="1" width="1"/>
<p><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ASuitableWardrobe/~3/IJ1RjZMSkOM/book-review-vicuna-queen-of-andes.html">Link</a>