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Cashmere
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Where does cashmere come from ?
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High in the Himalayan moutains of Ladakh and Tibet the goat breed Capra Hircus which once was wild, is now domesticated. More widely known as the Pashmina, they live at high altitude and very low temperatures, which can go down to -40°. The Pashmina wears a a thick fleece with long fine hairs - precious cashmere wool used to manufacture exquisite sweaters and scarves and is also used in suits.
While the Pashmina are from the Himalayas, nowadays it's China and Mongolia that we have to go to find this famous material. Indeed, those two countries produce three quarters of the wool produced all over the world, the rest coming from Iran and Afghanistan.
When the temperatures warm the goats naturally shed their undercoat fibres and these can be:
- recovered in the mountains by the local inhabitants from the wild goats.
- combed from the animal when it moults if the goat is domesticated.
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How do we obtain cashmere?
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Once the wool has been recovered it is washed to take out all the faults. This treatment means that 80% of the initial weight of the material recovered on the goat is lost. Each goat only produces on average 100g of workable cashmere wool, which is not even the equivalent of a basic cashmere sweater.
Cashmere can be coloured in different ways. The material can be tinted after it has been recovered from the goat, the threads directly tinted, or directly tint the sweater once it's made. These three different ways result in different cashmere quality, the best quality being obtained by using the first method.
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PERNAC sweaters are made with 100% pure cashmere. We offer a large collection of colours and a range of patterns.
All colours are available for each style of sweater :
- V neck
- Round neck
- Turtle neck.
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