Fashion, Clothing
CASHMERE THE QUEEN OF WOOL
20/07/2022
Discovering the "golden fleece," an extremely rare variety produced by living above 4,000 meters and known since ancient times for its properties of warmth and softness. The origin of cashmere to ancient herding communities dates back to Central Asia, where the precious resource originated as a natural protection from the climate.
What to Asians is called Kashmir, after the region suspended between India, Pakistan and China, and we know as cashmere or cashmere, according to the usual French customization, is a very rare layer of the wool produced by the Hircus goats, typical of the highlands of Ladakh , Tibet, above 4,000 meters, in the area that pushes into the Himalayas and Mongolia.
Removing the superfluous and rougher outer layer, each garment yields no more than 100 grams of cashmere wool (when making a simple knit requires about 8 km of yarn), reason enough to begin to understand the final costs, comforted by the figures: only 0.5 percent of the world‘s wool production is cashmere. Goats start on the moulting rocks in the spring in an attempt to shed the long hairs they can withstand winters where temperatures touch -40°. Since the dawn of time, shepherds have been following them at a distance, gathering with infinite patience the tufts of the precious wool that will take at least three years to make a lady‘s shawl. But it is a long and arduous process, and for years now shearing and processing have been modernized, in part to suffer the times and please the world‘s demands for cashmere. Once the shearing stage is over and the best hairs are selected, taking only the longest and finest from the undercoat (the diameter fluctuates around 15.5 microns, when a human hair measures 75), Tibetan wool moves on to weaving, which is the exact moment that ends up determining its final price: it ranges from two threads, to get a very fine weave, to over 10 for those that will eventually be thicker. It goes without saying that the more threads there are, the higher the price goes, which is reason enough to also understand that two-thread cashmere garments account for the largest market share.
Today, the supply of cashmere knows no bounds: the famous Tibetan wool is multiplied in every area of clothing and accessories, and is on the market at varying prices, but all pointing upward. But be careful, because no one is giving anything away: in addition to checking the percentage of cashmere present in the weave of the garment and the number of threads that make up the weaving, much depends on the origin of the wool itself: one thing is Tibetan wool, another for wools from Iran and Afghanistan, which are decidedly less valuable and sold more cheaply.
And for those who think that cashmere wool is to be relegated to winter fashion, just remember the "performance" of Gabriele Albertini, then Mayor of Milan, who was photographed in a swimsuit at the 1988 Fashion Week shows. Well, the garment he was wearing was signed by Valentino and made of "libidinous cashmere." Variety we prefer not to investigate further.
