Three winters ago, I was going to buy a $5000 Giorgio Armani cashmere coat that was slashed to under $1000. Unfortunately, it was too small for me no matter how hard I tried to squeeze into it. A fellow shopper asked, “Why would you pay that much for a coat when you can get an off-brand cashmere coat for a few hundred dollars?” The shopper just didn’t understand that all cashmere is not alike. Chic cashmere is the long, fine hairs that come from the inner downy undercoats of Chinese and Mongolian goats. The hair is then shipped off to be spun into yarn, dyed and woven. Italy and Scotland are known as being the best when it comes to producing cashmere.
Cheap cashmere is made from hairs of the outer layer as well as the inner coat of the goats. The outer layer hairs make for coarse cashmere as opposed to fine cashmere. It all boils down to one question: Do you want to be chic or cheap?