Every cashmere label says the same thing: 100% cashmere.
What it almost never says is which goat, which mountain range, or which grade of fibre went into the yarn. Those three facts explain most of the gap between a $70 sweater and a $700 one, and they explain why one pills after a single season while the other gets softer for a decade.
Here is what actually sits behind the label.
Cashmere is combed, not sheared
Cashmere is the soft undercoat that certain goats grow to survive high-altitude winters. It is not the outer guard hair, which is coarse and gets separated out during a process called dehairing. The undercoat is combed out by hand in spring as the animal naturally sheds.
That distinction matters commercially. A single goat yields roughly 150 to 200 grams of usable down a year, and that is before dehairing strips out the guard hair. A crewneck sweater takes the annual yield of several animals. Wool, by comparison, comes off a sheep by the kilo. The scarcity is real, and it is the floor under cashmere’s price.
The colder and harsher the winter, the finer the undercoat the animal grows. Altitude and latitude, not brand names, are the strongest predictors of raw fibre quality, and no amount of mill technology downstream can add fineness the animal never grew.
The three origins that matter
Around 90% of the world’s raw cashmere comes from China, Mongolia and the Himalayan belt. They are not interchangeable.
| Inner Mongolia (China) | Mongolia | Himalayas (Nepal, Tibet, Ladakh) | |
| Share of world supply | Largest producer | Second largest | Small, specialist |
| Goat breed | Various, incl. Hexi and Alashan | Mongolian cashmere goat | Chyangra (Capra hircus laniger) |
| Typical altitude | 1,000 to 2,000 m | 1,500 to 2,500 m | 3,000 to 4,500 m |
| Winter severity | Cold, continental | Extreme, dry | Extreme, thin air |
| Fibre character | Wide range, from very fine to commodity | Fine, good staple length | Fine, long staple, high crimp |
| Processing | Vertically integrated at scale | Mostly exported raw to China | Often hand-spun and hand-knit locally |
| What you pay for | Volume and consistency | Fibre quality | Fibre quality plus handwork |
China’s advantage is infrastructure: dehairing capacity, spinning mills, dye houses, and the scale to move enormous volumes at predictable quality. That is why so much of the world’s cashmere passes through Chinese processing regardless of where the goat lived. Mongolia’s advantage is the raw material itself, though the country captures only a fraction of the finished value because so much of the clip leaves as raw fibre. The Himalayan belt sits at the opposite end: tiny volume, exceptional fibre, hands rather than machines.
Why the country on the label usually misleads
A lot of cashmere labelled by a country is only processed there. Mongolia exports a large share of its raw clip to Chinese mills, so fibre grown on the steppe can legitimately end up in a garment naming another country. “Made in Italy” almost always means spun or knitted in Italy from fibre grown in Asia. Italian finishing genuinely matters to the hand of the fabric, but no goat in Tuscany is producing cashmere.
Country of origin on a garment label refers to where it was assembled, not where the goat lived. It tells you about labour and craft at the final stage. It tells you nothing about the fibre.
If origin genuinely matters to you, the question to ask a brand is not “where was this made” but “where was the fibre grown, and who spun it.”
What “grade” actually means
Grade is not a marketing word. It refers to two measurable properties: fibre diameter, measured in microns, and staple length, measured in millimetres.
Diameter determines softness. Staple length determines durability, because short fibres work loose from the twist of the yarn under friction and ball up on the surface. That is pilling. A sweater that pills badly in its first season is usually not badly knitted. It is knitted from short-staple fibre.
| Grade | Fibre diameter | Staple length | What it feels like | Where it ends up |
| A | ~14 to 15.5 microns | ~34 to 36 mm | Soft with no prickle, holds shape, resists pilling | Specialist knitwear, premium brands |
| B | ~19 microns | ~28 to 30 mm | Soft at first, pills within a season or two | Mid-market high street |
| C | ~30 microns | Short | Noticeably coarse, pills quickly | Blends, budget “cashmere” |
For context, human hair runs roughly 60 to 80 microns. Merino wool sits around 17 to 24. Grade C cashmere at 30 micrometers is coarser than a good merino, which is why some cashmere feels worse than a wool sweater at half the price. The word on the tag is doing a lot of work that the fibre is not.
Almost no brand puts a micron count on the swing tag. The ones that do are telling you something, and it is usually worth listening to.
Ply, twist and why two thin yarns beat one thick one
Ply is the number of individual yarns twisted together to make the thread that gets knitted. Single-ply is one strand. Two-ply is two strands twisted around each other, and it is the quiet marker that separates serious knitwear from the rest.
Two-ply is stronger, holds its shape better and resists pilling, because the twist locks fibre ends in place instead of letting them migrate to the surface. Single-ply can work in a lightweight summer piece, but in a winter sweater it is usually a cost decision rather than a design one.
Be careful with the shortcut that more ply equals better. A six-ply sweater made from Grade C fibre is still a Grade C sweater, just a thicker one. Ply multiplies whatever quality the fibre already has.
Dehairing: the step nobody advertises
After combing, the raw clip is a mix of soft down and coarse guard hair. Dehairing separates them. Done well, it removes almost all the guard hair while leaving the down intact and long. Done aggressively, it breaks fibres, shortens the staple and pushes a decent clip down a grade.
Mechanical dehairing is fast and dominates large-scale production. Hand-dehairing is slow, expensive and gentler on the fibre, which is one reason small Himalayan workshops produce yarn that punches above their volume. This is where a lot of quality gets quietly destroyed: excellent raw fibre poorly dehaired ends up as ordinary yarn, and nothing downstream can undo it.
The Himalayan case
The Chyangra goat grazes at 3,000 metres and above, in air thin enough and cold enough that the animal has no choice but to grow an extremely fine undercoat. That is the whole quality argument for Himalayan cashmere: it is not a processing advantage or a design advantage, it is an altitude advantage.
Nepal’s share of global supply is tiny, and its production model is different from the Chinese one. Rather than large integrated mills, much of it runs through small workshops where fibre is hand-spun and garments are hand-knitted. That is slower and it does not scale, but it keeps the value in the region where the fibre is grown, and it means the person who made your sweater is traceable in a way that a mill run of 40,000 units never is.
Yes Helping Hand, a workshop in Pokhara founded in 2011, is one example of how that model works in practice. It employs more than 180 artisans, mostly single mothers and differently-abled workers, and grades its fiber at 12 to 16 microns. Its Himalayan cashmere clothing runs from around $15 for accessories, which is a useful reference point when you are trying to work out how much of a luxury brand’s price is fibre and how much is positioning.
How origin shows up in the garment
You can feel most of this without a lab.
- Prickle. Run the fabric across the inside of your wrist. Fine cashmere feels like nothing. If you notice individual fibres, the micron count is high.
- Loft. Squeeze a handful and let go. Good cashmere springs back. Fibre that stays compressed has been over-processed or heavily washed to fake softness.
- Surface fuzz. A slight halo is normal. A cloudy, loose surface on a brand-new garment means short fibres are already migrating out, and it will pill.
- Weight versus warmth. High-crimp fibre traps more air, so genuinely good cashmere is warm without being heavy. A cashmere piece that feels dense and heavy is usually compensated with bulk.
- The stretch test. Pull gently across the knit and release. It should recover. If it stays stretched, the yarn is weak.
One caveat on softness: a brand-new budget sweater can feel wonderful because it was chemically softened and heavily washed at the factory. That effect is borrowed, not earned, and it washes out within a few cycles. Loft is the honest signal.
The sustainability question
Demand for cheap cashmere has pushed herd sizes up sharply in Mongolia and northern China, and goats graze hard, pulling plants up by the root in a way sheep do not. Overgrazing is a real pressure on both regions. It is the argument for buying less and buying better: a Grade A sweater worn for ten years uses a fraction of the fibre that five cheap ones do, and producers who pay for fibre by quality rather than weight give herders a reason to keep herds smaller.
What to ask before you buy
Five questions that get you further than any label:
- What is the micron count?
- What is the staple length, or at minimum, is it long-staple?
- Where was the fibre grown, as distinct from where the garment was made?
- Is it 2-ply or single-ply?
- Is it dehaired mechanically or by hand?
A brand that can answer all five is a brand that knows its supply chain. A brand that answers none of them is selling you a word, not a fibre.
Cashmere is one of the few materials where the difference between good and bad is genuinely measurable, and where the measurements are almost never printed on the tag. Ask for them anyway.
