Vicuña - the rarest cloth.
A pilgrimage to the highlands of the Andes.
March 2026 · A field letter
The vicuña is a distant cousin of the llama, smaller and shyer, and lives only on the high altiplano of Peru, between four and five thousand metres above sea level. Its coat is the finest natural fibre on earth - at twelve microns, thinner than cashmere, thinner than mohair, thinner than the hairs on the back of your hand.
The vicuña was hunted close to extinction by the Spanish conquistadors. The herds, today, are recovering, but the harvest is permitted only every two years, by traditional Inca chaccu - a community shearing in which the animals are gathered in a great line of villagers walking slowly across the puna, then released back to the wild after their fleeces have been taken by hand.
From a single vicuña, in two years, you may take perhaps two hundred and fifty grams of useable fibre. The Aurum Overcoat in the Origin collection requires the fleeces of fourteen animals.
This is why we do not call our pieces expensive. We call them rare.