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Outcry ensued after a Bloomberg story in March accused LVMH-owned Loro Piana of charging $9,000 for a sweater but paying little or nothing to the community that sources the vicuña fibre it’s made from. While Loro Piana denies these allegations, the story shed light on the dissonance between the luxury industry and the workers that prop it up all over the world. It also carries with it important learnings for how fashion does, or does not, support the wildlife ecosystems it relies on.
If done well, natural fibres could be fashion’s ticket to a leading role in conservation where it’s needed most. If not, animal-based fibres such as merino wool and vicuña can cause environmental degradation as well as animal cruelty and economic exploitation within fashion’s supply chain.
There are lessons to be learnt from Loro Piana, both in what the brand has done well and in what mistakes it has made. From an ecosystem perspective, experts say the story of the vicuña — a camel relative native to South America — is a conservation success. Thanks to decades-long government protections and a ban on vicuña fibre sales beginning in 1969 and then an initiative inviting private companies to start purchasing the fibres again in 1994, the vicuña population has grown from a low of 10,000 to approximately 200,000 in Peru today. That jump has removed the animal from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s endangered species Red List.
But initial measures to tie the programme to Indigenous citizens have since fallen apart. Loro Piana claimed a stretch of land — and the vicuñas on it — for itself, as Bloomberg reported. Some consider land ownership by foreign companies to be a violation of local values and land rights since traditional communities do not privatise land in the way that Western populations do. People in the village of Lucanas, the focus of the Bloomberg story, now live on meagre incomes and in poverty-like conditions despite being responsible for sourcing the most expensive fibre in the world.
Experts say it’s a lost opportunity for fashion to help reestablish or maintain the interconnectedness between ecosystem preservation, including wildlife populations, and economic well-being and human rights in local communities.
Loro Piana declined to comment on the record, but refutes the allegations made in the Bloomberg story and said in a statement to AFP in March that it has a “real and continued commitment in favour of the local population”. The ultra-luxury brand said out of all the vicuña it buys from Peru, 4 per cent comes from Lucanas. “Thanks to this harvest, the community receives from Loro Piana up to several hundred thousand dollars, on average, for their work every year.” It added that it’s aware “the situation may be challenging for some” and “will carry out initiatives on the ground in Peru to further strengthen its control of the local supply chain, in order to ensure that the sums paid to the organisations in charge of the harvesting are equitably allocated and redistributed”.
For some, the situation in and attention to the Lucanas community in Peru presents an opportunity for fashion to re-evaluate its relationship with wildlife and the communities that care for or coexist with it. Experts like Helen Crowley, former head of sustainable sourcing innovation at Gucci parent company Kering, say it’s possible to support both wildlife populations and community livelihoods at the same time. In fact, it’s necessary because the two are so interlinked — and there are opportunities to do more of both that fashion has yet to take advantage of, she says.
“If you are going to work with smallholder producers and people who are really on the margins of making a living — whether they’re cotton producers in India or cashmere herders in Mongolia or vicuña herders in South America — we’ve got to be respectful of those livelihoods and make sure they can benefit from these supply chains. It can be done well,” Crowley says. “It is about an integrated approach with the land the animal comes from — and the livelihoods. There’s so much potential for the fashion sector to drive positive outcomes for people and for animals, for nature, by doing things in a holistic way.”
Being part of nature, not separate from it
Fashion relies primarily on domesticated animals for fibres — wool, mohair, cashmere, alpaca and more — but some wild animals are also in the mix. Vicuña is the most prominent (alpaca are domesticated vicuña), but there’s also camel, yak, guanaco and even musk ox, for example. Fashion has a very mixed record with the former: cashmere production, particularly as it has been scaled to levels far beyond what is sustainable in recent years, is associated with soil degradation (a contributor to climate change) in Mongolia and erosion of the grasslands ecosystem in the Central Asian steppe. Wool, mohair and angora are associated with intensive use of natural resources, greenhouse gas emissions and allegations of widespread animal cruelty.
Fashion companies have an opportunity to apply the learnings from the vicuña conservation success story to guanaco, another camelid native to South America. (Camelids are a family of animals that include camels and llamas, and 2024 is the UN’s International Year of the Camelid.)
“I think it’s a good model that needs to get better,” says Ezequiel Infantino, biologist with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Argentina.
Guanaco fibre is a key fibre that experts put forth as offering significant and untapped potential for fashion, particularly as a luxury fibre, say experts. It is high in quality, and because it comes from a wild animal, its quantity is inherently limited. It’s coarser than vicuña, but can be a contender for specific products that don’t require the same softness; it can also be blended with other fibres, says Christine Lippai, executive director of the Wildlife Friendly Enterprise Network, which works to protect wildlife and offers a certification to enterprises “that assure people and nature coexist and thrive”.
Conservationists have been encouraging fashion to turn to guanaco because they see the animals as an opportunity to build an economic incentive for conservation — not unlike the vicuña.
“When you have a population that has a problem — for example, with the vicuña, it was the low numbers; for guanaco, it’s the conflict with the ranchers — if you can solve those problems with the sustainable use of the species, it’s like everybody wins,” says Infantino.
WCS is in discussions with brands (Infantino couldn’t name them, citing NDAs) to adopt a strategy that the organisation developed in cooperation with the National Research Council to engage ranchers in shearing guanaco fibre. This model would encourage ranchers to treat guanacos as a part of their business model rather than view them as a threat to their livestock, which Infantino says is the current situation. “What we need now is the market. The market to see and appreciate that this exotic, natural luxury fibre is worthy to make a market for. That’s what we are trying to do right now.”
There’s also work underway to encourage herders working with more traditional fibres, mohair and merino wool for example, to exist with local wildlife in a more sustainable way. Their herds are vulnerable to native carnivores like wild cats and foxes, and herders often kill them in order to protect their livestock, says WCS research assistant Aaron Baum. The predators are crucial for ecosystem stability, however, so the organisation has worked with herders to adopt non-lethal protection methods like automatic lights, olfactory deterrents and livestock guardian dogs.
Conservationists say this is the way forward for fashion: to understand the local context of the problems it is trying, or has the potential, to solve. Fashion is never going to save an endangered species, but can it find ways to work with, and alongside, the communities that can?
“I’m always hearing, ‘Where do we start? We have to do a risk analysis; we have to understand entire supply chains; all these things.’” says Crowley. “I’m for all of that, but there’s also the bottom-up: ‘How can I really work with those producers to create outcomes that are fabulously beneficial for everybody?’”
That also means shifting how brands approach biodiversity within their sustainability strategies — recognising that’s an area of expertise they may not possess internally. “Brands don’t know where the farm gate is. Many of them will know where the factory is, but they don’t know where the material has come from. There are people out there doing this kind of work. I think [brands] just need to not be too frightened [to engage them],” says Lippai. “Brands are in the fashion business. A lot of them are still in the early stages of developing their sustainability strategy — that can be anything. A biodiversity person, or a wildlife person in your sustainable-sourcing department, is going to have to be the way to go.”
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