Vicuña is your next $20,000 splurge
Summary:
Vicuña fabric is the rarest, softest, and most luxurious textile in the world. Harvested from wild Andean vicuñas, it’s finer than cashmere, warmer due to air-trapping fibers, and impossibly smooth. Its rarity, unmatched softness, and elite status make vicuña the ultimate symbol of exclusivity in luxury fashion.
In this series:
Part 1: Vicuna Introduction
Part 2: Personal Experience - Coming Soon
Part 3: Fabric Details and Research Links - Coming Soon
Read in 2 minutes.
A Personal Stylist's Introduction to Vicuña
You’re probably already familiar with most luxury cloth—merino wool, record bale, super 220s cashmere. Vicuña is in another league.
First, a vicuña is an animal, basically a small alpaca that only grows enough hair to be shorn every 2 years. And the shearing is a challenge. Since vicuña refuse to be domesticated, they live in the Andes at altitudes up to 17,000ft. And, with each animal requiring the same amount of land as it would take to service nine of the finest merino sheep, gathering them is somewhat of a pain. So much so that people used to kill them because it was easier, but Peru put a stop to that in the 1970s and now they are just ‘endangered.’
But you’ll find the (outsourced) hassle worth the effort because the fiber is something of an anomaly.
When you have a prized animal like this, you care about things like how fine the hair is on average and how much of the hair is usable. You also care about the composition of the fiber because that determines how the hair can be used. In all these metrics, vicuña is singularly unique.
Metrics for the nerdy (I’ll get really into the weeds in Part 3):
Vicuña hairs are, on average, 1.5 microns thinner than cashmere.
The standard deviation of fiber size throughout the fleece is less than 1 micron.
The percentage of fine hair (vs unusable guard hairs) is upward of 85%.
The cuticle scales on each fiber are only 0.03 microns high, compared to wool’s 0.08.
Vicuña fibers are partially medullated.
That last bit is particularly notable, so indulge me for just a moment. “Medullated” means the fiber is hollow—which is typically a bad thing from a processing standpoint because it makes the fiber more brittle, harder to weave, and harder to dye.
Since vicuña fibers only have “medullated islands,” they have intermittent pockets within the fiber that can trap more air without being subject to those processing difficulties. The idea of warmth is a function of how much hot air you can trap near your body. In a given cross-section of cloth, a thinner fiber leaves room for more air, so it feels warmer. But if a fiber can trap air both between the fibers and inside the fiber itself, that significantly increases the thermal insulation properties of the garment.
And trapping air is what the game is all about. Do it in a soft and lightweight package, and you’ve won. The tiny size of the fibers, coupled with the super-smooth cuticle structure, means it feels ridiculously smooth to the touch.
And that is why vicuña is the softest, warmest $20k you’re about to drop.
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Joshua Davis is the creative director for Monogram Styling, a luxury acquisition and image consulting firm with regular service to Atlanta, New York, Washington, D.C. and by appointment to clients worldwide. We manage the details of luxury.