Cashmere Isn't Cheap to Create - Fast cashmere is Fool’s Gold

There is a grey polo neck jumper I found on the website of a major UK high street brand. It comes in four colours. And five sizes. It costs £39.90. It was produced in Vietnam. It doesn’t say where the cashmere comes from but the dyeing was done in China. Once upon a time you might have assumed that if it was dyed in China, probably the fibre started out life in China because that would make sense. There is no sense to fast fashion apart from profit.

The details about the jumper a bit further down the page are sketchy. The brand basically says it is ‘working to improve’ information about the supply chain. It says it ‘wants to understand the origin of its raw materials’. The reason the brand wants to know is so that it will ‘improve the quality of the garments and ensure safer practices’.
But it doesn’t currently know. IT DOESN’T CURRENTLY KNOW.
The last line is a classic.

Having in a roundabout-kind-of-a-way admitted that the brand doesn’t know anything about where the fibre comes from or how the garments are made, it says that when it finds out it’ll ‘tell the customers so the customers can make informed choices about their clothing’.

But it doesn’t know yet.

If you skim read it, as most of us do with Ts&Cs - all the right words are there: improve, share, informed, understanding – but all the brand ACTUALLY KNOWS is that it was made in Vietnam and the fibre was dyed in China.

Even factoring in the economics of scaled production, I personally can’t reconcile how a fibre that needs a very specific goat, climate, season, situation, hand labour and skill, on the other side of the world, can turn up in the UK at the price of a decent lunch for two.
What was sacrificed in order to get the figure so low? Was it the welfare of the goats, the sustainability of the land, the wages of the herders and the knitters, the profit of the manufacturer, the quality of the fibre, or all of these? Fast cashmere can’t wave a magic wand and remove these costs – it simply moves them somewhere else where we, the consumers, can’t see them. The supply chain is paying for our fast cashmere and they don’t have the power to refuse.

The democratisation of cashmere from luxury to fast fashion happened in the 80s. I remember discovering a cashmere sweater in M&S and thinking it was a fantastic find. Before that, cashmere was a luxury (I’d spent years in itchy wool and cashmere had always been prohibitively expensive). Global production of quality cashmere was limited and prices were high. It was understood to represent something special: a material produced in small quantities by nomadic communities on some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. That scarcity was genuine. The price reflected it.

Then someone smart guessed that we poorer folk might like a little piece of the luxury action and fast cashmere was born – using inferior quality cashmere to get it to an affordable price. Demand grew. Goat populations grew. Grazing densities in some areas (not all) increased too. Fibre grades were blended and the cheapest ones were softened chemically. The result looked like cashmere, felt like cashmere and was cashmere – but then it was washed and worn and the pilling started and the structure of the yarn collapsed.

Fast cashmere is fool’s gold. It has created an entire generation of consumers who don’t understand what high quality cashmere really is, and encouraged original cashmere lovers to settle for something not as good. The entire cashmere industry has been undermined.