How To Buy Cashmere That Lasts: A Founder’s Guide to The Maths of Buying Better

A ‘pure’ cashmere jumper for £50 sounds compelling. Even I’ve fallen for it and I should know better. Here’s the true cost of fast cashmere and what to look for instead.

I’ve spent more than twenty years in luxury fashion. I’ve met high-flying CEOs and Creative Directors from the world’s best-loved cashmere brand, visited the source of most of the world’s cashmere fibres and sat with goats, herders and their families whose coats (the goats’), skills and care make it all possible. I have also, in the early years of cashmere democratisation, and before I knew better, bought cheap cashmere. Let’s just call it fast cashmere. Fast cashmere is fool’s gold.

A £50 cashmere jumper will pill within three washes. Some £50 cashmere jumpers won’t even wait that long. You look at them, they’ll pill. For those of you currently jumping up and down saying you bought a sweater from Uniqlo a year ago and it’s still in good nick – I’d just ask, does it still feel like cashmere? Really? Or is it now just an indeterminate jumper. Because cashmere should go on feeling like cashmere. If anything, it should get softer over time.

If a £50 cashmere jumper makes it to six washes, the shape and structure will have died. It will have become thinner, rougher and all the cute fluffiness that first seduced you will have dispersed into the ether. Your £50 outlay has not saved you £150 against the £200 alternative. It has cost you £50 for maybe six months wear, if you’re lucky. It’s a garment that was designed to be replaced. This is the planned obsolescence that’s taken over our phones, laptops, vacuum cleaners etc etc. Our grandparents bought one hoover/sewing machine/lawn mower/car even, and expected it to last for life. Same with cashmere jumpers. Back in the day.

So, the £50 price tag for the fast cashmere isn’t a bargain we’ve lucked out to come across. It simply reflects the lack of care in producing it. Fast cashmere is produced at speed and in huge volumes, from goats living on overstretched land, cared for by herders paid a minimum price. When we pay less for cashmere, everyone else in the supply chain, from the goats, the herders, the land, the spinners, the manufacturers, they all pay.

The economics of buying a cheap jumper and replacing it, over buying a more expensive jumper and wearing it for years, is obvious. But planned obsolescence is more than a retail sneak. It’s become a lifestyle choice. Consumers don’t expect clothes to last anymore and neither do they want them to. With 52 drops per year by many fast fashion brands, we’re encouraged to fancy something new every week of every year. And we do. But for the sake of the environment, of playing fair with herders, of the welfare of the goats, we need to adopt a different approach. And we need to do the maths more honestly.

To get a cashmere sweater that will last, you need to start with the fibre. High quality cashmere is graded by two measurements: the micron count (the width of the individual fibre) and the staple length. GRADE A cashmere (at Baker Miller Pink Cashmere we only use this) has a micron count of 14-15 (a human hair is 70+) and a length of 36mm or more. Fast cashmere, even the stuff that’s called ‘pure’ and ‘luxury’ is shorter, thicker and of mixed length, making it pill. Sometimes poor quality fibre is softened chemically so that it feels like higher quality yarn. But the softness doesn’t last. A GRADE A cashmere sweater gets softer over the years, and never loses its structure.

I often get asked how long a Baker Miller Pink jumper will last. If you look after it well, it could be years. I’ve got jumpers I bought twenty years ago that are still going strong. But today, cashmere is most often not made that way. Fast cashmere has become the norm. I’d like to introduce old fashioned quality at fair prices.