Stealth corniness — diagnosed & dodged

Luxury vampires, plus a bevy of fire SS24 shirts

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— Jonah & Erin

The Plane, back with you. In today’s sletter we’re serving up potent recon on fire SS24 button-ups…

But first — !

A fascinating Businessweek story made the rounds last week about indigenous subsistence farmers in the Peruvian Andes who help gather the most expensive wool on the planet for Loro Piana. These farmers, part of the Lucanas community, work for no money over several days at 13,000-ft elevation, corralling and shearing vicuñas — wild-ranging, mad cute camel-type beasts who have far finer and thus far more desirable wool than their domesticated equivalents, alpacas. Vicuñas, being wild animals, hate the shearing process, which often necessitates that they’re trapped overnight without food or water.

Loro Piana is the Lucanas’ exclusive client for vicuña wool, which the brand markets as “the fiber of the gods.” (Mach 3+ Spyfriends know Loro Piana logo caps as one of the “stealthily” corniest jawns a person can rock!!) The article’s author, Marcelo Rochabrún, reports that Loro Piana pays “about $280” in exchange for enough raw material to make a vicuña sweater that sells for $9,000.

Loro Piana’s payment to the Lucanas community used to be north of $400/kilo, and the rate was supposed to stay stable despite surplus wool Loro Piana generated itself via a 4,900-acre vicuña enclosure that a free-markets-friendly Peruvian regime allowed the company to purchase for $160,000 in the early 2000s. But in 2013, Loro Piana sold to LVMH and Bernard Arnault — not just a billionaire, but the world’s richest billionaire — after which point the payments began to decline steadily.

This is a big part of why Arnault is as wealthy as he is. LVMH trades in putative “luxury,” but the company tends to create an exalted aura around its brands primarily via splashy marketing spends, e.g. signing Emma Stone (the preeminent actor of her generation to be clear!!) to an ~$11 million Louis Vuitton endorsement contract or whatever. Meanwhile, Arnault’s seeming M.O. behind the scenes is to squeeze production margins as assiduously as he can, even when that means the final products are palpably less luxurious. See, e.g., how Rimowa luggage got simultaneously more expensive, more advertised, and less nicely made after LVMH acquired the company.

In the end, the Businessweek piece is fascinating because it’s an exceptional story, i.e., about a wildly rare wool and the rural indigenous farmers paid $0 individually for their work collecting it. (The expectation is that they work free for the greater good of their community, whose president decides how to allocate Loro Piana’s payment.)

But the piece is also fascinating because it’s a surprising, microcosmic luxury twist on a depressingly familiar, wholly unexceptional tale — i.e., westerners extracting wealth from a structurally impoverished Global South. This theme is echoed by the fact that, while the vicuña-coralling elderly of Lucanas remain mostly un-proletarianized subsistence farmers, “the younger people either move to cities or work in the unregulated and often dangerous gold mines that dot the region.”

Since reading Rochabrún’s article, I’ve found myself wondering: In the alternate scenario where LVMH did pay the elders wages for the vicuña work directly, what would we realistically expect the company to pay them? Garment workers in L.A. right this instant get paid criminally exploitative “piece rates.” Any compensation for the farmers would likely be welcome vs. $Free.99, sure — but would it represent a meaningfully “fairer” arrangement of labor and wealth than the current one? Would it solve, ameliorate or in fact perpetuate the state of f**kedness the article describes?

The full story is here.

Shifting gears —

We aren’t the “Better Business Bureau,” but it is time for a B.B.B.:

BEVY of BANGER BUTTON-UPs !!

Yes, we’re talking great new Spring/Summer shirts from a clutch of small lines we f**k with… Including the simplest, sturdiest, slappingest new denim workshirt we’ve come across in a minute…