Plate No. 113fabric
One of the many natural colors of the undyed alpaca fleece.
- First documented
- Antiquity
- Origin
- the Andes, Peru
- Fiber
- alpaca fiber
- Weave
- woven or knitted, from alpaca fleece
- Family
- twills
Plate No. 113 · fabric
Alpaca
Alpaca is cloth from the fleece of the alpaca, a domesticated camelid of the high Andes bred for fiber for thousands of years. Unlike sheep's wool it carries no lanolin, so it is hypoallergenic and needs less processing, and it grows in a wide range of natural colors from white through fawn to deep brown and black. The fleece is warm, light, and lustrous, finer and stronger than ordinary wool. In Inca society the finest alpaca and vicuna cloth was reserved for the nobility, and the animal remains central to the economy of the Peruvian and Bolivian highlands.
Named for
From the Spanish alpaca, taken from the Aymara allpaqa, the name of the animal.
Often confused with
Sources & References
- 1.Alpaca fiber, Wikipedia
- 2.Alpaca, Wikipedia