[Northkeep] Exotic Fibre Arts

Amadeo Estevão rockmeamadeo at gmail.com
Fri Nov 5 09:44:16 PDT 2010


To all my fiber arts friends this article is pretty cool...
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/11/04/fabrics-even-finer-than-cashmere.html?from=rss

 Beyond the Cashmere Sweater
by Nick Foulkes <http://www.newsweek.com/authors/nick-foulkes.html>November
04, 2010
  Courtesy Modus Publicity

Standing two and a quarter meters at the shoulder and weighing as much as a
midsize car, the yak is the buffalo of the Mongolian steppe. Shaggy and
extremely hardy, these giants can survive thousands of meters above sea
level in the freezing, remote peaks of Tibet and Nepal; to cope with life
high in the sky, their heart and lungs are bigger than those of other
bovines.

For the Tibetan and Nepalese people, yaks are true beasts of burden, lugging
plows and carrying loads high into the mountains. The locals also drink
their milk, eat their meat, and use their dung for fuel. For those of us who
frequent the luxury
<http://www.newsweek.com/tag/luxury-products.html>boutiques of the
world, however, there is little to top a yak’s wool. It is
one of the few exotic fibers that tempts shoppers who have grown weary of
ubiquitous cashmere.

This year the British luxury brand Alfred Dunhill has introduced a small
collection made of yak wool blended in equal parts with merino. The company
is using not the animal’s coarse outer hair but fibers from the soft, downy
undercoat that offers seasonal protection from the winter cold, and which
the yaks shed in summer if it’s not “harvested.” The wool produces a fabric
that is extremely warm and luxurious, as well as exotic. And it is the
evocative qualities of yak, as much as the physical ones, that attracted
Dunhill. “Yak is found throughout the Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, and as
far north as Mongolia and Russia, and this fit in perfectly with our
autumn/winter theme, which included the Trans-Siberian Express route,” says
CEO Christopher Colfer.

Yak is not the only fiber giving cashmere a run for its wads of money this
season. Partly that’s due to cashmere’s unpredictability. “There is
cashmere, and there is cashmere,” says Elisabetta Canali, of the eponymous
Italian suit maker. With an annual global production of around 12,000 metric
tons, variation in quality is inevitable. Canali says that cashmere made
from fibers that are too short or improperly finished is liable to pill and
lose its shape.

In fact, some of the finer wools created by modern spinning and milling
techniques are much more exclusive than cashmere. Cervelt, for instance, is
made from red-deer fiber and offered by Neapolitan tailor Mariano Rubinacci.
“It is a soft fabric but with body, similar to camel hair,” says Rubinacci.
In addition, Canali has noticed increased interest in what she calls
“precious” fibers, such as blends of cashmere with chinchilla or ermine.
Another favorite to blend with cashmere is ultra-exclusive vicuña, which
makes an appreciable difference to the handle of cashmere, even in
relatively small proportions.

Loro Piana is among the luxury brands that has embraced vicuña. Over the
last 20 years or so, it has been an important member of a consortium of
fabric makers devoted to bringing the fabled vicuña back from the brink of
extinction. This small creature, similar to a hornless gazelle, lives in the
Andes 4,000 meters above sea level and yields the world’s most expensive
fiber—four to six times as pricey as cashmere—light, warm, and super-soft.
During Incan times, vicuña lived in abundance, but in recent years numbers
dropped so low that the species was protected and trading in it made
illegal. Recently that changed. “In the early 1990s, when we were first
awarded the right to legally distribute sheared vicuña, the number of heads
of animal was 5,000,” says Sergio Loro Piana. “Two years ago when we bought
a 2,200-hectare reserve, there were 180,000 [in Peru].”

But Loro Piana has not been developing vicuña in lieu of further refining
cashmere. The company has trademarked a variety known as baby cashmere, the
ounce or so of soft, downy fiber produced when Mongolian goatherds first
comb the hair from their young animals; Loro Piana says it is about 20
percent softer than his regular cashmere.

The shift toward lighter, softer fabrics is changing the precious-wool
market. In addition to improved milling techniques and an increased appetite
for novelty, changing lifestyles have wrought a dramatic transformation in
the fabrics that high-end consumers are looking for. Increased travel and
the proliferation of climate-controlled environments have led to an upsurge
in “trans-seasonal fabrics,” says Anna Zegna, granddaughter of the founder
Ermenegildo and image director of the 100-year-old fabric and apparel brand,
prompting her firm to rethink its approach to cashmere. So in addition to
working with vicuña and superfine wools, it is coming out with worsted
cashmere fabrics in light, summer weights of 230 grams, “which is really
nothing; close your eyes and you feel like you have a shirt in hand,” she
says.

With cashmere getting ever lighter, more colorful, and more advanced; yak
giving up their winter hair; and the fabled vicuña now coming back in
numbers not seen since the Incas, what are the new frontiers of fabric? Loro
Piana has a few ideas. He recently announced the discovery of a raw material
that was both new to the textile industry and “natural and antique”: Burmese
lotus-flower fiber. For Loro Piana this is the vicuña of plant-based
fabrics—“simply unbelievable, a gigantic truffle and the last discovered
jewel of the world in terms of textile fiber.”

Well, perhaps not quite the last. One species that continues to elude makers
of luxury fabrics: the Tibetan antelope. This high-altitude animal yields
the fiber that makes the *shahtoosh*, the ultraluxurious shawls that are so
fine they can allegedly be passed through a wedding ring. But the species is
endangered, so legal trade in this fiber is banned and no responsible brand
is weaving it. The situation is further complicated because the animal’s
habitat is in both Tibet and India, meaning that a vicuña-style arrangement
would require the coordination of two governments. However, should some sort
of solution be reached, it would be fascinating to see what could be done
with a fiber that has a diameter of about 10 microns—four to five times
thinner than a human hair.



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