Cashmere

• The fibers are lie below the goat’s coarse hair as an undercoat of superfine fibers concentrated on the underbelly.

What Makes It So Soft?

• fine diameter-less than 18.5 microns
• the shape of the fibers: it’s bumpy
• The bumpy fibers in cashmere all cling to themselves so nothing sticks out to scratch you

Collecting Fibers Process

• In Asia, Mongolia, Afghanistan, China, Iran
• In May and June, when the goats molt,

1. local workers comb the belly hair
2. sort it by hand
3. send it to a dehairing facility (usually in China) to be cleaned and refined.
4. then it’s baled and delivered to Europe
5. spun into fine yarn and sold to designers for roughly $114 a pound in Europe

• Afghanistan has become exporter of the cashmere due to raw material shortage in Asia

1. The country is rich in unmodified raw materials
2. China has been known to add and blend different qualities of cashmere to achieve volume
3. Afghan goat farmers keep true to the raw unchanged pure cashmere: supplying the market with completely pure knits. (4 goats= 1 sweater)

• Four traditional, primary markets for cashmere production had been the USA, Europe (UK and Italy), Japan and China itself.
• If the cashmere is to be converted into worsted yarn it must first pass through one additional processing step known as combing.