The Loro Piana $9,000 sweater scandal is the tip of the iceberg

Poverty wages are just part of fashion's operating system

The opening sentence says it all: “Once a year, Andrea Barrientos, a 75-year-old subsistence farmer in the Peruvian Andes, works free of charge for the world’s richest person.” 

Last week, Bloomberg published an investigation of the Vicuña wool used by Loro Piana, the ultra-ultra-expensive luxury house that’s owned by Bernard Arnault, one of the world’s richest men. Vicuña is a kind of llama that’s found high up in the Andes, and its wool is the world’s most expensive fiber — much more luxe than cashmere, alpaca and mohair. The publication interviewed Andrea Barrientos, a villager in Peru who was working without pay to shear Vicuña wool that would be then used by Loro Piana to make some of the world’s most expensive clothes.

Barrientos, the 75-year-old who was interviewed in Bloomberg’s piece, lives in Lucanas, an indigenous community of subsistence farmers high up in the Peruvian Andes. Once a year, Lucanas’s farmers gather herds of Vicuña to shear them for their ultra-valuable wool, which is then sold exclusively to Loro Piana. The Lucanas farmers don’t get enough money to pay everyone, so Barrientos volunteers her work for free. She’s never even seen a piece made of Vicuña before. And on the other side of the world, the wool she’s harvested is used to make sweaters that cost $9,000. That price tag sounds like outrageous clickbait, but it’s true. As well as $9,735 cardigans, you’ll also find Vicuña wool in Loro Piana’s baseball caps ($2,100 — with a cashmere lining), or blended with silk and cashmere in a bomber jacket ($20,150).

There’s a lot more to the story — it involves the Peruvian government, which regulates the cultivation and sale of Vicuña wool, the Lucanas community leaders who decide who’s paid for their work, and of course, Loro Piana, which has built an entire operation in Peru to secure its access to Vicuña. But regardless of the details, the asymmetry is shocking. Subsistence farmers in Peru, who live without plumbing in houses made of mud, working in poverty to cultivate the world’s most expensive fibers, which are sold by the world’s most expensive brand, owned by one of the world’s richest men. 

Even for a luxury house, Loro Piana’s prices are insane — it’s a brand for the 1%, and the 1% only. As I wrote a while back in my piece on Pharrell’s $1m Louis Vuitton bag, the obscene prices these guys are charging are just a depressing sign of the times. Income inequality has skyrocketed in the last 20 years — in 2007, Forbes calculated that there were 946 billionaires in the world, but now there’s 2,640. Luxury houses are jumping at the chance to make more money out of the ultra-rich, and are making themselves even richer in the process. Bernard Arnault is on-and-off the world’s richest man, with a current net worth of $235.9 billion, up there with Bezos and Musk and the rest of them.

We’re so used to seeing stories like this about fast fashion, so it feels like a shock to see luxury houses implicated, but the sad truth is that you’ll find exploitation everywhere. That’s because the industry is set up in a way that disincentivizes good behaviour — it costs you money to be the good guy. Nobody makes more money by treating people well, or by being more sustainable. And because Big Fashion is constantly looking for ways to cut corners and save money, poverty wages are built into the system — along with dirty fossil fuels, toxic chemical pollution and mountains of waste.