Vicuña ★

The animal

The vicuña is a camelid (the family that includes llamas, alpacas and guanacos) and the smallest of them, standing under a metre at the shoulder and weighing around 45 kilograms. It lives wild on the altiplano of Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, generally between 3,500 and 5,000 metres, where the daily temperature swing is severe.

Its fleece is the adaptation to that. The fibres are extremely fine and hollow-cored, trapping air; the coat insulates against nights well below freezing while remaining light. It is also, for the same reasons, exceptionally soft against the skin.

Why it is so scarce

Arithmetic. A vicuña carries only a few hundred grams of usable fibre and its fleece takes about two years to regrow, so an animal is shorn roughly every other year and yields in the region of 200 grams of clean fibre. A coat needs the fleece of a dozen or more animals, gathered over years.

The animals are wild. They cannot be farmed intensively in the way alpacas or goats are, they are territorial, and they live in terrain that makes gathering them a considerable undertaking. Annual world production is measured in single-figure tonnes.

Nearly extinct, then not

The Inca state reserved vicuña cloth for the ruler and his household, and managed the animals through the chaccu: a communal round-up in which vicuñas were herded, shorn and released. That system ended with the Spanish conquest, and with firearms the animals were shot for their fleece.

By the mid-1960s the population had fallen to a few thousand. Peru created the Pampa Galeras reserve in 1967, the Vicuña Convention followed among the Andean states, and the species was listed on CITES Appendix I in 1975, prohibiting commercial international trade. Populations recovered sufficiently that some have since been moved to Appendix II, which permits regulated trade in fibre shorn from live animals.

The modern system revived the chaccu. Local communities round up, shear and release the animals, and hold the rights to the fibre, the conservation argument being that a living vicuña is worth more to the people around it than a dead one. It has worked, though poaching persists and the distribution of the money is contested.

Buying it

Legally traded vicuña carries documentation, and reputable mills and brands can trace it. Fibre without a chain of custody should be assumed to be poached, and importing it is an offence in most jurisdictions.

The material's practical drawback is that it is delicate. Vicuña is usually woven or knitted in its natural colour, a distinctive warm gold-brown, because bleaching and dyeing damage such fine fibre, and a vicuña overcoat is a garment to be worn carefully rather than one that will take twenty winters of daily use.