It takes the season's combing of dozens of young goats to make enough yarn for a single baby cashmere sweater. The fiber is gathered only once in an animal's life, when the kid is under a year old, and only by hand. There is no way to scale it, no way to rush it, no way to synthesize it. Which means that for a mill to agree to sell it to you, the mill has to believe two things: that you will pay for the yarn you order, and that you will sell the garments you make from it. Neither of those is assumed when you are new.
I came to the cashmere mill the way I came to Thomas Mason — slowly. Crawl, walk, run. For the first season, I ordered modestly. For the second, a little more. Baby cashmere was not on the table in the beginning, and I did not ask for it to be. These mills have been doing this for longer than my lifetime. Their caution is not personal. It is the way a two-hundred-year-old house survives.
What I did not expect is how much of this work I would not be doing alone. The knit developer I work with in New York came to me through a mutual friend who gave me, frankly, the introduction of a career. He had built his relationships with these mills over decades, working with some of the most respected designers in American fashion, and he brought me in on his name as much as on my own. He has since turned work away to keep building what we are building together. The baby cashmere in this collection exists because two people vouched for me before the mills had any reason to.
— Eleanor
On Rarity | Why Baby Cashmere Matters
Most cashmere on the market today is not what you think it is. The word has been stretched across a catalog of price points so wide that "cashmere" now describes both a thirty-dollar sweater at a department store and a fiber so rare that it is sold by the gram. The low end of that spectrum tells you almost nothing about the high end.
Baby cashmere is the high end.
It is harvested only once in a goat's life, from the undercoat of a kid under twelve months old, before the animal's fiber thickens with age. Each kid yields roughly thirty grams of usable fiber per season — enough, when combined with the output of many others, to make part of one garment. The fibers themselves measure around 13.5 microns in diameter, which approaches the fineness of vicuña and sits well below even the best adult cashmere. This is the softest natural fiber most people will ever put against their skin.
It cannot be mass-produced. It cannot be cut with lesser grades without losing what makes it itself. It is simply what it is, in the small quantities that nature allows.
The Fiber | A Brief History of Baby Cashmere
Cashmere takes its name from Kashmir, the region that first introduced the fiber to Europe by way of shawls carried along trade routes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fiber itself, however, has always come from further north and east — from the cashmere goats of Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and the high plateaus of Central Asia, whose harsh winters and arid summers force the animals to grow the fine insulating undercoat that makes the fiber possible. Without the cold, there is no cashmere. Without the particular poverty of the terrain, there is no cashmere worth having.
Baby cashmere as a named, distinct grade is a more recent development. For most of the fiber's history, the soft undercoat of young goats was simply combed in with the rest. It was an Italian house in the late twentieth century that first recognized the kid fleece as something separate and worth isolating — softer, finer, and worth the considerable effort of sorting. That recognition required convincing herders to separate the fiber from the kids from that of the adults, a change that took years to implement and involves a yield so small that the economics only work at the very top of the market.
The raw fiber then travels, as it has for generations, to the mills of northern Italy — to Biella in Piedmont, to the cashmere workshops of Umbria and the Marche — where the craft of transforming cashmere into finished yarn and garment has been refined over more than a century. This is the lineage behind our Core Collection knitwear.
What Makes It Different | Why Baby Cashmere
A sweater is only as good as the yarn it is knit from, and yarn is only as good as the fiber it is spun from. Baby cashmere is a different fiber from ordinary cashmere in ways that are measurable and ways that are not.
The measurable part is fineness. Standard cashmere typically measures between fifteen and nineteen microns. Baby cashmere measures between thirteen and fifteen and a half. This is not a small difference. A finer fiber produces a finer yarn, which produces a finished piece that is lighter in the hand, smoother against the skin, and less prone to the surface roughness that makes ordinary wool itchy. The difference between fifteen microns and thirteen is the difference between cashmere you enjoy and cashmere you forget you are wearing.
The less measurable part is what happens to the fiber over time. Because the fibers are longer, finer, and cleaner at the source, baby cashmere garments resist pilling better than regular cashmere. They hold their shape. They develop, with wear, a softness that deepens rather than breaks down.
The mill we work with is one of the small number of Italian houses with the access, experience, and herder relationships to handle baby cashmere at all. The fiber arrives sorted and certified. It is spun slowly, on equipment calibrated for the finest yarns. It is dyed with the same care given to vicuña, because the margin for error on a fiber this expensive is essentially zero.
This is how you produce knitwear that warrants the category it claims.
Beyond the Catalog | On Access and the Opening of the Book
Within the world of Italian cashmere there are fibers the mills show freely and fibers they do not. Baby cashmere sits firmly in the second category. It is not printed in the general yarn catalogs. It is not offered to new accounts. It is not even mentioned, in many cases, until the mill has watched a brand operate across enough seasons to know that the investment is warranted. Mills of this caliber do not take chances on fibers this rare.
The same principle applies to vicuña, the fiber even rarer than baby cashmere, which our mill has historically opened its book on to only two other brands working today — both of them houses whose names you would recognize immediately. The company we keep at that level is not company we have earned the right to claim casually. We mention it only because it is true, and because it speaks to the standard the mill holds its partners to.
Eleanor was not shown the baby cashmere book for some time. That arrival followed years of smaller orders, delivered commitments, and the steady accumulation of trust that these relationships require. It also followed the introduction of a knit developer in New York — a specialist whose own reputation at these mills long precedes Eleanor's, and whose vouching opened doors that would otherwise have remained closed for considerably longer. The mill's willingness to extend its rarest fibers to our Core Collection is a direct reflection of the team that assembled around this brand in its earliest days, and of the slow, unglamorous work of proving that the cloth would be honored.
How It Feels | How Does Baby Cashmere Feel?
Our baby cashmere pieces weigh almost nothing in the hand. They drape rather than hang. Against the skin they register not as fabric exactly but as a kind of warmth with no surface — the feeling of being slightly warmer than you were a moment ago, without anything having happened to produce it. This is not hyperbole. It is what a thirteen-micron fiber does.
With wear, the pieces soften further. With care — hand washing, folded storage — they hold their hand for years. Baby cashmere is not a seasonal garment in the disposable sense. It is the sweater you reach for in October and still reach for, five Octobers later, because nothing you have acquired in the interim has replaced it.
Why It Belongs in Our Core Collection
Every brand has to decide what its baseline is. Ours is the best of what a category can be, offered at the fairest price we can responsibly hold, and anchored in materials that do not require apology.
Baby cashmere sits at the top of its category. There is no finer natural fiber available outside of vicuña, and no synthetic alternative exists or is likely to. Including it in our Core Collection is a statement about what we believe a Core Collection should be: not the most accessible thing we make, and not the most photographed, but the thing we are most confident will still feel right in a decade.
Shop the Baby Cashmere Shell →
Shop the Baby Cashmere Cardigan →
