The Golden Fleece
Cashmere is showing up in everything from Gap sweaters to custom-made Loro Piana suits. What does it take to procure the purest form of the luxury business's favorite fiber?
By Susan Jakes/Dadal
Fall 2005 Style & Design
The tiny animal squirming in my arms doesn't feel like a gold mine.
Rumpled and wobbly kneed, it seems capable of producing little other
than an earsplitting impersonation of a game-show buzzer. But the
herdsman who has thrust this newborn goat into my arms knows better. He
gestures at his flock milling around on this vast green expanse of
Mongolian grassland just a few miles from the birthplace of Genghis
Khan. Then he points to my sweater, and his sun-lined face cracks into a
broad grin. This is no ordinary goat. It will grow up to produce
cashmere, the fiber capable of imparting opulence to the simplest of
garments.
My tour of the ties that bind these animals to the luxury kingdom comes
courtesy of Loro Piana, an Italian company that is among the world's
largest producers of cashmere apparel, textiles and yarn. I have been
invited to this remote land to learn a simple lesson: like goats, not
all cashmere is created equal. Once reserved only for the deep-pocketed
few, the golden fleece now tangles freely with strands of basic wool,
warming the throats and ankles of shoppers at Gucci and the Gap alike.
But as many established fashion houses dilute their cachet to appeal to
the masses—stamping their logos on key chains and blending their
cashmere with lowlier materials—Loro Piana remains defiantly committed
to serving its luxury straight up. To abide by the company credo
"Quality without compromise," the staff has to spend a lot of time
hobnobbing with goats.
The firm supplies yarn to dozens of other companies, but Pier Luigi Loro
Piana, who inherited the business from five generations of his
cloth-weaving forebears, has no wish to make clothes for the multitude.
He describes the customers who frequent his 71 stores as "quality
addicts." His sales team not only coddles them with $2,000 shawls and
custom-made suits but will also gladly upholster their private planes in
cashmere or sell them a jacket specially designed for people who drive
vintage cars.
This approach is as much a business tactic as a matter of taste. The
past decade has seen China become a knitting and weaving powerhouse. The
nation dominates the low end of the cashmere spectrum through a
combination of direct access to raw material—China has the world's
largest population of cashmere goats—and a huge pool of inexpensive
labor. To maintain a safe distance from what Loro Piana calls "cheap
quality," his company has kept most of its manufacturing at home in
Italy and maintained prices that per ounce of finished product sometimes
rival those of gold—a feat accomplished in large part through its
creative fixation on refining and publicizing the very noncheap quality
of its raw materials. In addition to establishing a wholly owned
subsidiary to ensure that it procures the best cashmere in Mongolia, the
company has teamed up with the Peruvian government to help bring the
vicuņa, a smooth-coated camel-like animal, back from the brink of
extinction. And in Australia and New Zealand, Loro Piana holds a yearly
contest for the world's finest single bale of merino wool.
Cashmere is derived from a goat's downy fleece undercoat, which grows
beneath a coat of longer "guard hairs" in winter and gets shed in
spring. Any goat can produce it, but most don't live in places cold
enough to make them do so. The fiber owes its name to Kashmir, the
contested swath of mountains in northern India and Pakistan, which is
where Europeans first encountered it. Today the region produces
relatively little of the world's annual 16,000-ton supply, which comes
mainly from herds on the Mongolian steppe in China and Mongolia.
Cashmere owes its prized softness to the shape of its fibers, which have
a slimmer girth and smoother surface than sheep's wool and are free of
wool's itchy scales. Each wisp measures between 12.5 and 18.5 microns
(thousandths of a millimeter) thick and can range in length from 30 to
50 mm. Raw cashmere can be white, gray or brown. The finer, the longer
and the whiter, the more valuable it is. China's goats produce the
world's finest raw cashmere and Mongolia's the longest, and Loro Piana
tries to buy the best of both.
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