“Really, these clothes could not be further away from our image,” says Pier
Luigi Loro Piana, latest in the line of sons to run the eponymous Italian
luxury goods and fabrics company. He grins as he looks out of the car window
at the wildly dressed Peruvians who have gathered to welcome him for a
celebration. “But they are so fantastico, eh, that perhaps we should have
our next fashion shows here? Paris, Milan, Nasca… What do you think?”
Certainly, the elaborate garb worn by the mountain dwellers who eke out a
living 4,500m up on the plateaus of the Andes appears to have very little in
common with that worn by the suave Loro Piana and his wife, Laura. Unlike
the couple, attired in the classic colours of the European elite (discreet
navy, grey and camel), the Peruvians don’t appear to mind clashing hues.
Violent yellows are mixed indiscriminately with purples, reds and neons and
embellished with rainbow-coloured tinsel and bells. The hip apparel of
teenage boys appears to be a fully feathered set of condor wings strapped to
their backs. And children’s costumes are so ornate, it’s often difficult to
see their faces for shiny silver fringing.
But, strangely, it is clothing that brings these two disparate groups
together. The super-soft, latte-coloured sweaters that both Italians are
wearing as they step out of the car are knitted from the fine hair of the
vicuña, which are herded by Peruvians. And the animal’s survival depends on
both.
Once, in the 1500s, the time of the Incas, there is said to have been more
than one million vicuña living in South America, between Bolivia, Argentina,
Chile and Peru. The gentle, doe-eyed camelid was so sacred it was offered as
the ultimate sacrifice to the sun god. It was too precious to be
domesticated and its hair, at a thickness of 12 microns the finest in the
world, was so prized that only royalty could wear it.
At that time, the hair was sheared only every four years, and the animal set
free again to roam the Andes. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the
16th century, however, they started to hunt the vicuña for its valuable
“new-world silk”. By the time the Peruvian government got around to creating
a national reserve, the Pampa Galeras, in 1967, only about 5,000 survived,
resulting in a ban on trade and an Appendix I listing – the highest – on the
register of endangered species by Cites (the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species). With talk of it becoming extinct, no one was
allowed to shear, and the vicuña trade was stopped altogether.
For Pier Luigi Loro Piana, 57, that clampdown was in some ways welcome, and in
others a disaster. “My father had been one of the first Europeans to create
vicuña clothing,” he explains as we drive up the arid 4,800m mountainsides
on which vicuña roam wild. “He came here in the early Sixties and became
well known for his classic vicuña overcoats. So when we couldn’t get it any
more, of course it wasn’t a good moment. But the more we talked to people,
the more I became convinced that the only way to protect it properly – in
the long term – was to trade it legally and create a market for it. Because
only when people think an animal is useful will they take care of it and
breed it. Without a market, it would be left to die.”
Convincing others that their idea – part-environmental, part-commercial – was
worthwhile proved tricky. The Loro Pianas – Pier Luigi and his brother
Sergio – started to communicate with the Peruvian government in 1984, with
the help of their friend and lawyer, Adolfo Bottari. “But you are not just
dealing with national government, who change their minds every time they
change leader, which is often, but regional officials and associations of
vicuña herders,” Bottari says. “Where we are today has taken I can’t tell
you how many weeks, months, years. And a lot – and I mean a lot – of
patience.”
More than a decade later, not only have they convinced Cites to downgrade the
creature to Appendix II (which means its hair can be traded), they have also
persuaded the government to let them buy 5,000kg of raw hair annually,
making them the biggest exporter of vicuña from the 700-plus communities
that live off the creature. Even more excitingly for the Loro Piana sons,
they have just bought 2,000 acres of stony reserve in the Pampa Galeras to
breed herds for themselves, and a wide, green valley of 120 hectares in
which they hope to build a research centre and a six-bedroomed house, so
visitors can see the creatures in the wild.
It’s to this 120 hectares, dedicated to their father, Franco Loro Piana, that
Pier Luigi has come for the first ceremonial shearing – or chaccu – of 480
of his own creatures. “The first Loro Piana hair from Loro Piana vicuña,” he
says happily, surveying his land, which rolls back from the road into a
horseshoe-shaped range of hills. “What would make me very happy would be if
we could buy more land, keep more vicuña, and really get trade going. If we
had two million vicuña in the Andes, that would be perfect. From that we
would still only get 40,000kg – which is nothing compared to cashmere, which
is 10,000,000kg a year – but it would build up the market, and give these
people more reason to stay.”
It seems the locals are pretty partial to his plans too. Two decades ago, when
vicuña populations were low, nearly all the campesiños left their mountain
villages to find work in towns. In this rocky territory – thousands of miles
of rock and sand with a few stubby grass patches and tough herbs – crops do
not grow and farm animals cannot survive. Without the altitude-resistant,
large-hearted, red-bloodcell-rich vicuña, there was no living to be made.
But since vicuña was reintroduced to the market in the Nineties, with the
campesiños selling hair from an estimated 150,000 animals to companies from
Brioni to Ballantyne, there has been a marked repopulation of the Cordillera
(the mountainous area between 4,000 and 6,000 metres). In the village of
Lucanas, says local lawyer Alfonso Martinez, there is now a new school and
funding to support groups involved in Peruvian music, dance and theatre.
Life is returning to the mountains.
Certainly, the villagers I speak to all seem happy to be back and have put on
their celebratory best for the Loro Pianas’ chaccu. Children’s troupes in
various shades of neon perform routines; a group of teenage boys puts on a
theatre production about the capture of an armed vicuña poacher; violinists,
guitarists and harpists gaily strum out tunes on intricately painted
instruments… even little groups of old ladies in their best woollen skirts
and long black braids join in.
