Eleganza senza Tempo: Homewear in Vicuña
Vicuña
The most valuable and exclusive textile fiber in the world comes from the smallest of the South American camelids: the vicuña.
80% of this protected species, of which today there are around 180,000 specimens , lives in the Andes, in enormous farms that allow them to live in the wild . This animal, considered sacred by the Inca population , risked extinction from 1572, the date that marks the end of the Inca empire, to the 1970s.
The decline of this breed, which began following Spanish colonization, was caused first by the conquistadors and subsequently by poachers who persecuted this animal for centuries in order to take possession of its highly prized fleece.
In the 1960s there were around 5 thousand specimens , unlike the 3 million present in the sixteenth century . Therefore, between the 1960s and 1970s, the first attempts to safeguard this animal species by the Peruvian state began, resulting in the creation of natural reserves and the issuing of decrees regulating its killing and trade.
It was in Washington, in 1976 , that the vicuña was included in Appendix I , reserved for species requiring the highest level of protection . This action, undertaken by the UN international convention that regulates the trade of endangered animals and plants, decreed the end of every form of exploitation of the vicuña.
Numerous reasons justify the preciousness of the coat of this animal which is considered so valuable that it is even nicknamed " Fleece of the Gods ". The difficulty in finding it due to the low number of existing specimens adds to the minimal quantity of wool produced by this adult animal, which is around 100 grams of fiber every two years , a minimum quantity considering that for a coat it is necessary to use wool fleece. approximately 25-30 adult animals .