Cashmere Jumpers - Serious Style

Cashmere jumpers have been a mainstay of the fashion world for many years, and their luxurious look and feel is unsurpassed by any other textile. Throughout the centuries cashmere has remained a highly prized commodity that has always been sought after by connoisseurs of high-quality clothing.

Popular with everyone from 15th-century South Asian aristocrats to movie star Grace Kelly with her elegant twinsets in the 1950s, cashmere has a universal appeal unmatched by any other textile, whether natural or man-made.

Cashmere has always commanded a high premium, and when you appreciate just what goes in to making cashmere jumpers you soon understand why.

The production of cashmere begins in the high plains of Mongolia and Xinjiang in China, where the indigenous Himalayan goat has developed a unique coat in order to survive in the extreme conditions that ravage the remote mountainsides.

With an outer coat of rough guard hair protecting an undercoat of exceedingly fine, crimped down, the cashmere goat is easily able to withstand the harsh nights and icy winters. To make the cashmere fabric, the fine fibres have to be meticulously combed from the animals, a painstaking process which can take days.

Six times finer than a human hair, cashmere fibres have a unique softness and warmth that no other fibre can match. Amazingly, it takes the hair of one goat to produce a scarf, two to make a lady's cashmere jumper, three for a man's jumper, and up to 24 to make an overcoat.

With the fibres removed from the goat, there is still a long way to go before the finished cashmere garments find their way to the shop floor. The raw fibres are first dyed to the required colour, then teased to open, matted fibres, carded in preparation for spinning and then spun into yarn for use in weaving.

Scotland is a prolific producer of cashmere clothing, and is known throughout the world for the quality of its cashmere craftsmanship. Generations of Scottish weavers have honed their skills on this distinctive material, and developed a singular wealth of knowledge and techniques that allow them really to bring out the best in this luxury textile.

Another asset they have in their favour is the famously soft Scottish water used in the production process, which adds an extra lustre to the finished article.

Scotland's weavers produce some of the finest cashmere garments available anywhere in the world, with an eye for quality and attention to detail that is hard to beat. From simple, classic jumpers with a marvellously understated elegance to more colourful avant-garde creations that are on the cutting edge of style, Scottish cashmere has it all.

So next time you walk past a display of cashmere jumpers in your local high street, don't just marvel at the remarkable softness and cosiness of the jumpers themselves, but spare a thought also for the remarkable journey each cashmere fibre has made, not to mention the many pairs of expert hands it has passed through on the way.