Authors: Meg Lukens Noonan
Jane’s office is lined with file cabinets and bookshelves. On top of one cabinet, a clear plastic bin holds bleached bones. Next to that, a cardboard carton that once apparently carried boxes of Angel breakfast cereal has the word “Vicuña” scrawled across it in black marker. Jane offers me a straight-backed chair in front of her desk and tells me that I’m welcome to browse her collection of books, journals, and papers about vicuñas—many of which she has written herself.
“Most people who come really just want at the library,” she says and turns her attention to her large computer monitor.
I stack up a pile of material and start reading. Vicuñas, distant relatives of Arabian dromedaries and Bactrian camels, are found only on the Andes altiplano, the desolate windy plateau between twelve thousand and sixteen thousand feet that stretches from southern Peru to northern Argentina. At those elevations, oxygen levels are low and temperatures are often well below freezing, but, more than any other mammal, vicuñas are built to handle extremes. Relatively large hearts and an unusually high number of red blood cells allow them to make efficient use of limited oxygen. Lower incisors that grow constantly let them gnaw on the toughest alpine grasses without wearing down their
teeth. Cushioned hooves stand up to rocky terrain, and long necks make it possible for them to spot predators from a distance. Extra-rich milk allows nursing babies to mature quickly.
Most remarkable, though, is their fluffy cinnamon-colored coat, which provides protection from the intense high-altitude sun and insulation from the cold. It is made up of individual fibers that are a minute 12 microns (1/25,000 of an inch) in diameter, finer than cashmere, which averages about 19 microns. Human hair, by contrast, ranges from about 40 to 120 microns.
If the vicuñas’ adaptation to their difficult habitat is Darwinian, their appearance leans more toward the Disneyesque. Vicuñas seem conjured up by a team of Imagineers who were pressed by their bosses to come up with something
really
cute this time. Sleek wedge-shaped heads top their elegant long necks. Split upper lips, a camel-family trait, help fix their dark mouths in pursed half-grins. Large black eyes, outlined pharaoh style, are trimmed, almost inevitably, with a thick fringe of über-Bambi lashes. The overall effect: heart-yanking vulnerability meets bigscreen charisma.
Inca societies revered the vicuñas as livestock of the gods and had strict rules governing the use of their fleece. Only royalty was allowed to wear vicuña garments or sleep on vicuña bedclothes—and violators had to answer to what may have been history’s first fashion police. The punishment was no joke: unauthorized wearing of vicuña was grounds for execution.
The production of the fibers was also tightly controlled. In order to allow the animal’s coat to reach full growth, shearing took place in designated regions only every three or four years, during a highly ritualized communal roundup called the
chaccu
. On a day selected by the Incan king, thousands of men would walk out across the puna and form a human chain surrounding
huge herds of vicuña. Moving forward in an ever-tightening circle, the Indians drove the animals into makeshift corrals, then clipped and released them. Vicuñas produce just under one pound of fleece per shearing—and grow it back slowly, at the rate of about an inch a year. The fibers are quite short, which makes spinning difficult.
That job, in Inca times, fell to the
aclla
, or Virgins of the Sun, young girls who were selected as much for their beauty as for their dexterity to be the spinners and weavers to the royal family. Isolated in a special building, they were kept busy by the nobles, who, by some accounts, had the capriciousness of fourteen-year-old girls, often changing outfits several times a day and wearing each garment only once. Cloth was treated like gold and tucked away in imperial warehouses.
In 1532, when Francisco Pizarro and his small army of about 160 men arrived on Peru’s northwest coast, there were an estimated two million vicuñas on the Andean altiplano. But the conquistadors, who had brought horses, long-barreled guns, and no spiritual attachment to the odd, long-necked animals, quickly began to reduce the herds.
As early as 1553, the conquistador Pedro Cieza de León wrote, “In bygone times, before the Spaniards conquered this kingdom, there were throughout these sierras and countryside great numbers of llamas, and even guanacos and vicuñas. But the Spaniards killed them off so fast that there are almost none.”
Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a conquistador and an Incan princess, echoed that observation in his account of the history of Peru, published in the early seventeenth century: “
Such in those times was the abundance of their Game but now it is said, that such havock hath been made by the Guns which the
Spaniards
use, that there is scarce a …
vicuña
to be found but what are affrighted
into the Mountains, and inaccessible places, where no path or way can be made.”
Once vicuña blankets were sent back to Spain for the bed of King Philip II, the animals’ fate was sealed. A desire for this New World Silk, as it was called, swept Europe. For the next several hundred years, the slaughter continued at a breathtaking pace. Some people did notice that the great herds were dwindling and spoke out about it.
In 1768, viceroy Marqués de Rocafuerte sounded an alarm and said, “Whoever should find the vicuñas may shear them but on no account kill them, so that the species shall not become extinct.”
The notion that an entire species might disappear was a radical one at the time. Simón Bolívar, Peru’s forward-thinking first governor after the country won independence from Spain, however, believed wholeheartedly that, where the vicuña was concerned, extinction was a real threat. In 1825, he declared a ban on vicuña hunting and laid out strict guidelines governing when live shearing could take place. Shipping records show that between 1663 and 1853 the skins of 1.5 million vicuñas were supplied to European markets for vicuña gloves, shawls, hats, and cloaks. In a 1901 newspaper ad, a Bryan, Ohio, department store touted vicuña underwear as the perfect choice for men who were “rheumatical sufferers.” The drawers, they claimed, were “worth their weight in gold.” Each pair cost a dollar.
In 1920, trade in vicuña products was forbidden. Six years later, the exporting of vicuña fiber was outlawed. A law prohibiting the hunting of vicuña, guanaco, and chinchilla was passed in 1940. None of the forty-odd other attempts to legislate the conservation of the species had any effect, since they failed to include a specific plan for enforcement and were not coordinated
with Argentina, Bolivia, or Chile, each of which had a vicuña population.
By the time vicuña fever hit America, it was accepted as fact that fleece could be harvested only from dead animals. That point was made in a flowery little book called
Vicuna: The World’s Finest Fabric
, produced in 1937 by Sylvan Stroock, the owner of S. Stroock & Co., a prominent New York textile manufacturer who specialized in vicuña and other rare cloth: “
Yes, rare indeed is the vicuna, that curious little animal which must give up its life to furnish the hair for the richest and most luxurious fabric that has ever come from the loom.”
Forty animals were required to make one overcoat, more if the cloth was a heftier weave.
At Christmastime in 1938, shoppers crowded around the window of Marty Walker, a Manhattan menswear store, to see a special-edition heavyweight Stroock vicuña coat that was selling for $900 and was advertised as being made from the pelts of sixty animals.
By the mid-twentieth century in America, nothing said panache like a vicuña overcoat. Desi Arnaz, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Leonard Bernstein, Groucho Marx, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., Lena Horne, and Dean Martin all had one. Vicuña also came to symbolize a certain kind of moral decay, thanks to its role in Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic,
Sunset Boulevard
. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, a sneering menswear salesman hisses into the ear of William Holden’s kept-man character, “
As long as the lady is paying for it, why not take the vicuña?”
Neiman Marcus, the Dallas emporium of extravagance, became closely identified with the fabric. While a New York store might have two or three coats in stock, Neiman Marcus kept an inventory of three hundred, in a full range of sizes, priced at $695
each.
Stanley Marcus, the former chairman of the board, recalled in his memoir,
Minding the Store
, the day he got a call from an Egyptian man who was in New York shopping for vicuña coats for his entire family but hadn’t been able to find a store that could accommodate them. Neiman Marcus had plenty of coats, Marcus assured the man, who promptly flew his entire family to Dallas to get five vicuña coats: one for himself, his wife, his daughter, and his two sons. After he made the purchase, they all flew back to New York.
In 1955,
Life
magazine reported on a “melee of elegance” among Seventh Avenue garment makers, who were being swamped with orders for clothing made of luxury fabrics. One manufacturer of $10,000 mink-lined vicuña coats told a reporter that he was afraid he would run out of vicuña before he ran out of customers.
In 1957, Jack Kerouac wore an oversized vicuña coat that came down to his ankles to a brunch with Salvador Dalí at the St. Regis, according to the biographer Ellis Amburn. The coat had been given to Kerouac by a friend, who had stolen it. Kerouac later traded it to the poet Randall Jarrell for a fur-collared leather bomber jacket.
That same year, the slugger Ted Williams ended up with one by force majeure, according to a tale told to a reporter at the
San Francisco Chronicle
by a salesclerk. An earthquake had struck while Williams was trying on a vicuña coat on the fourth floor of Roos/Atkins, a Sutter Street menswear shop, and he had dashed in fright out of the store wearing the coat. The clerk said he had not returned.
A year later, a political scandal turned vicuña into a household word. Sherman Adams, Dwight Eisenhower’s White House chief of staff and a former governor of New Hampshire, was forced to resign when it was revealed in House subcommittee
hearings that he had accepted a vicuña overcoat from Bernard Goldfine, a Boston textile manufacturer who was being investigated for Federal Trade Commission violations.
Vicuña hung in windows of Arabian palaces and was draped over sofas in the Kennedy White House. Newspapers noted that Hedy Lamarr wore a vicuña coat to her 1966 Florida court date to plead innocent to shoplifting $86 worth of merchandise. The tawny overcoats were de rigueur for everyone from Italian mafiosi to Japanese dentists.
Vicuña, it seemed, was everywhere. And then the supply all but dried up. The vicuña population fell from about 400,000 in the 1950s to roughly 10,000 by 1967.
Were it not for Felipe Benavides Barreda, an elegant former Peruvian diplomat and a graduate of the London School of Economics, the vicuña might have disappeared forever.
“
I began to bellow and shout that there were no vicuña left,” Benavides said in a
New Yorker
profile. “They said I was mad.”
Benavides fought for reserves for the animals. In 1969, he helped establish the Pampas Galeras, a sixteen-thousand-acre vicuña sanctuary in Peru’s southern altiplano that employed armed guards to protect the animals from poachers. He also authored the La Paz agreement between Peru and neighboring countries with vicuña populations, calling for a ten-year ban on hunting and trafficking in vicuña wool. European zoos protested the treaty, saying they needed to import vicuñas for their collections, but the agreement stuck. The penalty was one year in prison for every vicuña killed. Traders were given three to five years, with no possibility for bail. The authorities were finally getting serious. In 1975, vicuñas were listed on Appendix 1 (most endangered) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES).
Though poachers were still operating and the Shining Path terrorist group hindered conservation activities into the 1990s, the population began to rebound. As the herds grew, the focus shifted from hands-off preservation to a policy of sustainable use. The vicuña, after all, had gold on its back and lived in a place where most of the indigenous people scraped along on about $300 a year. In 1995, the trade ban on cloth made from Peruvian fiber was lifted, and President Fujimori signed a law giving usufruct rights to the campesinos on whose communal land the animals lived. A consortium of three firms—the Italian companies Loro Piana and Agnona and the Peruvian company Inca Group—was awarded the rights to export and process the fiber.
The government also reinstated the
chaccu
, the ancient Inca model of sustainability. The plan called for rural Andeans to round up the vicuñas and shear and release them. The revenues from selling the raw fiber—roughly $100 for every animal shorn—would go to their communities. In exchange, they would protect the animals from poachers and do what they could to keep the population growing. By 1994, Peru had about 67,000 vicuñas; by 2010, there were close to 180,000. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reclassified the animal as “Least Concern.”
The vicuña’s odyssey back from the edge of extinction was one of the first demonstrations that conservation through sustainable use actually worked. Before the sustainability concept began to gain traction, the prevailing wisdom among animal-protection groups was that in order to save a species, you essentially had to put it under glass—and leave it alone to reproduce.
Though the population rebound is impressive, biologists, including Jane Wheeler, say the vicuña is still at risk. Poachers continue to kill animals for their fleece. In one particularly gruesome
episode, in 2010, some 150 vicuñas, many of them newborns, were trapped and slaughtered in a remote area of southern Peru’s highlands. The high market value of vicuña fleece has opened the door for unscrupulous middlemen and corruption. Climate change, meanwhile, threatens the animals’ habitat, as does overgrazing on grasslands by domestic livestock.