Keith Taylor
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- Jul 4, 2019
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so only buy expensive cashmere?
I’d say the answer to this is an unequivocal yes. Personally, apart from a wonderful sleeping mask and a couple of scarves I bought from one of Mongolia’s many cashmere stores I only buy vintage cashmere (not because I’m a crunchy environmentalist but because I’m a cheapskate), and I know that the difference in quality between a well used sweater made of good quality cashmere and a new one made from short fibers sold for $50 in a high street store is stark. Good cashmere will last an age, while fast fashion cashmere will last a season.
Cheap cashmere is more of a marketing gimmick than a good idea. If all the fast fashion cashmere in the world vanished tomorrow nobody would miss out, because it’s not really any better than comparable cheaper material that doesn’t have quite the same reputation. It just sounds alluring, as it did to the cleaning lady in Seinfeld who dreamed of it as a child. “Cccccaaaashmeeeere”.
Merino wool provides four times the yield of cashmere from each animal. If you replaced Mongolia’s 30 million cashmere goats with 7.5 million sheep reared for merino wool you’d be well on the way to genuine sustainability without giving up a single ounce of material. You could even replace them with 30 million sheep and reward herders with four times their usual yield, and it would still be more sustainable than cashmere goats because sheep don’t eat the roots and flowers, which is the real source of the problem.
So yeah, I’d say we should make cashmere a luxury good again. We should stop chasing volume and price me entirely out of the market. $50 cashmere sweaters are a false economy.