I started making cashmere because I kept being disappointed by it. I'd order from brands that advertised quality, but the sweater would pill within a few wears. When I looked closer, I found that sweaters sold as pure cashmere were often blended with synthetic fibers, and items marketed as American or Italian houses were actually made somewhere else.
I decided to learn everything I could about how to source the best cashmere and how to design it to last. The more I learned, the more I realized: if I wanted to find what I was looking for, I would need to make it myself.
— Eleanor
What Is Cashmere?
Cashmere doesn't come from a particular breed of sheep or a proprietary process. It's a natural fiber combed from the soft, fine undercoat of goats — extraordinarily fine, and capable of regulating temperature in both cool and warm conditions.
You see a lot of cashmere marketed within retail, but quality cashmere is genuinely scarce. A single goat produces about four ounces of usable fiber per year, roughly enough to fill a small envelope. It takes the annual yield of three to four goats to make one sweater. That scarcity is part of why cashmere has always been considered a luxury. But scarcity alone doesn't explain the difference between a $100 sweater and a $5,000 one.
How Cashmere Is Harvested
Every spring, cashmere goats naturally shed their winter undercoat. How that fiber is collected is one of the most important decisions in the entire supply chain.
The traditional method is combing. Herders work through each animal by hand with wide-toothed combs, separating the soft undercoat from the coarser outer guard hairs. It's painstaking work, but the result is longer, finer fibers that’s collected the moment the animal is naturally ready to release them.
The faster alternative is shearing, where the entire coat is cut off and mechanically separated later. It's more efficient and less expensive, but the fibers come out shorter and mixed with more guard hair. The animal doesn't choose when to let go; the timeline is dictated by production.
The difference between fiber that was patiently combed and fiber that was quickly shorn follows its quality through every stage of its life. It determines how the yarn spins, how the fabric feels, and ultimately whether a sweater pills after a season or lasts a decade.
What Makes High-Quality Cashmere?
Fiber length is the first indicator. Longer fibers — around 35mm — produce stronger, more resilient yarn that holds together over years of wear. Shorter fibers, closer to 30mm, are weaker and more prone to working loose from the surface. That's what pilling is: short fibers breaking free. A few millimeters of staple length is the difference between a sweater that ages gracefully and one that looks tired after a single winter.
Fineness is measured in microns. The finest cashmere measures around 15 microns in diameter. That's where the softness comes from, the quality that makes cashmere feel the way it does. Lower-grade cashmere can measure 19 microns or more. Still soft by most standards, but noticeably different once you've felt the real thing. We work with cashmere that is 14-15 microns.
There’s also purity. The best cashmere has been meticulously de-haired, with nearly all coarse guard hairs removed. Cheaper grades skip this step or rush it, leaving behind fibers that make the fabric feel coarser and look fuzzier over time.
Finally, there's what happens at the mill, meaning how the fiber is washed, dyed, and spun into yarn. A mill that takes eight weeks to process cashmere carefully will produce a fundamentally different fabric than one that pushes the same fiber through faster solely to meet production needs.
Where We Stand on Blends
These days you can spend $100 on a cashmere sweater or $5,000 on one. Many shoppers can't tell the difference, and brands often advertise quality standards that aren't reflective of what they're actually selling.
At Eleanor Leftwich, cashmere is cashmere. We will never blend our knits with nylon "for durability," polyester "to reduce pilling," or elastane "for stretch." We believe when high-quality cashmere is properly processed, it doesn't need synthetic reinforcement. We may occasionally weave cashmere with other pure materials – like silk or merino – in our knitwear collections, but synthetics have no place in it.
Why We Choose Pure Cashmere
Whether you buy from Eleanor Leftwich or find your cashmere elsewhere, we want you to have the tools to discern quality. We'd rather you buy one sweater that holds for a lifetime than cycle through ten that last a season each.
Eleanor Leftwich is a small, founder-led brand. We don't carry the overhead larger companies do, and we aren't beholden to outside investors or shareholder margins. That structure gives us the freedom to source based on conviction and to choose materials because they are right, not because they are efficient.
Explore Eleanor Leftwich Cashmere
The same standards described above guide every knit we produce. Our cashmere is sourced for fiber length, softness, and durability so that each piece improves with wear rather than deteriorating over time.
