Our Cashmere

The Holy Trinity of Scottish Cashmere

Browse any brand's website and you’ll be told that their cashmere is the best in the world. It’s a claim made so often, with little back up, that it has stopped meaning so much. The truth is much more specific and way more interesting. Scottish cashmere, the kind I use for L Y N N E is not one thing, it’s the result of three; Goats in Inner Mongolia, a particular kind of water in Scotland and the hands of artisans who have been doing this work in specific places for over 200 years.

I call this the Holy Trinity. Take any one element away or replace it with something cheaper and what remains is still technically cashmere, but it’s not the same material. It won’t feel the same on your skin and it won’t last as long on your back. There’s a great deal of vague language around the cashmere category. ‘Hand combed' 'nomadic' 'grade A' 'sustainably sourced’ - all mostly buzz words that do real work in obscuring what’s actually in the product.

I have spent the last 15 years inside the British and Scottish textiles industry, first as a fashion journalist, later as Brand Guardian of DC Dalgliesh and as an author of a couple of books on the subject.

One of the most useful things I can offer you is the clearest possible explanation of what Scottish cashmere actually is, why it costs what it does and what to ask yourself before parting with the price of a good handbag. That question is do you care? I do.

Firstly it all begins with the glamours goat.

A goat which is not Scottish, I say this often because it’s the part most people get wrong and its the part that makes the rest make sense.

The cashmere fleece I use comes from the Capra Hircus goat which lives at altitude on the high plateaux of Inner Mongolia. These plateaux range from 2000 to 3,500 metres above sea level. To put that in perspective, Ben Nevis, the highest point in the British Isles comes in at 1,345 metres. Temperatures there swing from minus 40 to plus 40 degrees between winter and spring. By comparison the average yearly temperature around Ben Nevis ranges from minus 5 to plus 20 degrees hovering consistently around freezing at the summit all year round.

That brutal thermal fluctuation and pressure is the reason the cashmere is what it is. To thrive in that range the goats grow two coats. A coarse outer guard hair to protect them from wind and rain and the fine downy under fleece called the duvet which is actually the cashmere. The cashmere is what traps their body heat in sub zero temperatures while keeping them cool as temperatures climb.

The under fleece is so fine you can barely see it with the naked eye. Each fibre measures between 14 to 19 microns in diameter. For comparison a human hair is around 80 microns, sheep wool sits between 25 to 30 microns. Grade A cashmere, which I use, sits between 14 to 16 microns with fibre length between 38 to 40 millimetres. Longer length matters, it aids with pilling and holding up the garment shape over time. These are not numbers I put out for marketing purposes, they are what the mill measures fibre against to retain excellence.

A single goat yields between 150 to 250 grams of usable cashmere a year. Some years, like with Champagne, cashmere yield can fluctuate due to environmental factors. 150g of fleece isn’t a lot. A typical 200g cashmere sweater requires the entire annual fleece of around 3 goats. Both a traditional Guernsey and L Y N N E Guernsey is knitted to be around a kilogram in weight, this needs the annual fibre yield of between 8 to 10 goats. And that is before the fleece is dyed, spun, knitted and finished.

After collection the under fleece has to be separated from the guard hair. This is when the goat and artisan overlap. This meticulous work is so labour intensive that it has influenced the English language. The term splitting hairs comes directly from the textile floor. The phrase originally described the work. It then became a derogatory metaphor later on, the way a great deal of working class craft language has been quietly absorbed into every day speech without acknowledgment. However it is absolutely worth knowing when you are paying for it.

One more thing about the goat, because it changes how a person wears the material. Cashmere is not just a winter fibre. The animals it comes from spend their lives in a temperature range from minus forty to plus forty degrees Celsius. The fibre's ability to regulate heat in both directions is built into its biology. A properly-made cashmere piece is wearable on a chilly January morning and on a warm August evening over a damp swimsuit. If a cashmere garment cannot be worn comfortably in summer, in any climate, it is almost certainly not the fibre it claims to be.

Cashmere goats are now farmed in several places - South Africa, New Zealand, Iran, Afghanistan, parts of China outside Inner Mongolia and even Scotland itself. The species is the same. The fibre from these places is honestly called cashmere but the under-fleece is shaped by environmental pressure as much as by the animal, and a goat at temperate sea level does not need to grow the same survival fibre as a goat at three thousand metres in the Gobi. (I have written separately about how Champagne offers a useful analogy for thinking about this. Same vine, different terroir, one is Champagne the other is sparkling wine).

The mill I work with holds a B.Corp certification, sourcing its cashmere fibre directly through approved partners in Inner Mongolia, with full traceability from the animal to the yarn cone. Without that traceability, the word cashmere describes a category, not a material — and the difference between the two is most of what you are paying for.

The second element is the part most cashmere brands skip past. Scottish cashmere is not Scottish because the goats are Scottish - they aren’t. It is Scottish because the fleece is transformed in to yarn in Scotland, and the most important moment in that transformation involves Scottish water.

Our water is soft. That is a technical description, not a poetic one. Soft water contains low concentrations of dissolved minerals, specifically magnesium and calcium, that make hard water hard. When cashmere fibre is dyed, spun and wet-finished in soft water, the fibres open up consistently and predictably. The dye takes evenly and the wet-finishing produces the bloom, that particular handle, surface character and softness that Scottish-finished cashmere is known for.

The wet-finish is the moment a piece of knitted cashmere becomes the cashmere a customer recognises. Fresh off the knitting machine, a freshly knitted piece is dense and slightly stiff. Wet-finishing is a process of washing it under carefully controlled conditions. This process releases the fibres, blooms the surface, and produces the softness the material is famous for. In hard water, the process is unreliable as the balance of minerals interferes with the wash and the result is duller and less consistent. In Scottish water, the process is consistent. Repeated over thousands of pieces a year, for over two centuries, that consistency is what built the reputation Scottish cashmere now carries.

Scottish mills know this, which is why they sit where they sit. Todd & Duncan, one of the country's oldest and most respected cashmere spinners, are situated on the banks of Loch Leven in Kinross. The choice of location is not aesthetic. The natural waters of the loch has the softness and consistency the mill needs. Their dyes are designed so that the water, after use, can be cleaned and returned to the loch in a closed loop to continue to feed its thriving wildlife ecosystem.

I love it there. Walking around the mill is one of the most transporting experiences in the British textile world, whether its the size of the place, the noise, the smell of fibre, the people running machines that have been running for decades, it feels like a small industrial cathedral, a place where the raw fleece of those Mongolian mountain goats is finally turned into Scottish cashmere. Every step that you witness there from the blending, the carding, the spinning, the dyeing, it's the accumulated work of generations. None of it is replaceable.

Soft water is not unique to Scotland, many locations around the world has it. What is unique to Scotland is the combination of soft water, two centuries of mill expertise and an established supply chain of the Inner Mongolian fibre all completing the triangle of geography, history and trade. That did not happen by accident and could not be reconstructed elsewhere on a short timescale. There are logical reasons that a Mongolian goat's fleece travels four thousand miles to be washed in the lochs of Kinross and Hawick rather than processed at source. Amongst those reasons is the water and the people who learned how to use it.

When you pay a premium for Scottish-finished cashmere, the water is part of what you are paying for. It is also part of what cannot be replicated by a brand that buys Inner Mongolian fibre and finishes it somewhere else with harder water. The terroir of cashmere is not just where the goats live. It is also where the fibre is transformed.

The third element is the hardest to value at first glance, and the easiest to lose if it is not protected.

Cashmere fibre and soft water without trained hands, produces nothing. The hands themselves take two centuries of accumulated knowledge to train, and they cannot be simply replaced by a machine just because they run the machine.

Scotland has been producing knitwear continuously since the eighteenth century. Hawick, in the Scottish Borders, has been the country's knitwear capital for the same length of time. At its nineteenth-century peak, Scotland was producing over a million pieces of hosiery a year. The industry survived the consolidation of the twentieth century, the recession of the 90s and Noughties, and the offshoring of cheaper production by holding firm on the standard that built it: garments made to last, by people who had been taught by people who had been taught. That continuity is the artisanal element. A weaver at Lochcarron, where my Shepherd's Plaid blanket is woven, has often spent decades on the looms. The former chief artisan at DC Dalgliesh, where I served as Brand Guardian for ten years, could hold a length of cloth up to daylight and read the tightness of the weave from across the room. The skill is physical, exact, and hard-won. It is also passed person to person, because no manual replaces a hand on a loom. My commitment at L Y N N E is to keep the craft alive in the specific places it belongs. A Fair Isle jumper must be knitted on Fair Isle. A Guernsey must be knitted on Guernsey. A Shepherd's Plaid must be woven in the Borders. The geography is not aesthetic. A Fair Isle pattern is just a pattern if it’s made elsewhere. The piece's relationship to its place is what makes it.

On Fair Isle, the cashmere yarn arrives by post at the croft of Marie, one of five women still producing knitwear on that remote island in the gap between the Scottish mainland and Norway. Marie is a friend, and we are bonded over a shared love of knitting, islands, wild swimming, and provenance. Knitting is her way of life between mandatory shifts at the airport and the fire station, between lambing in the spring and the daily work of keeping a tight community running. Knitting is one job among several; it is also a tradition stretching back five centuries on the island, kept alive by the small number of people there. A single L Y N N E cashmere Fair Isle takes Marie roughly twenty-five hours of work on her electronic flatbed knitting machine, after the design time for the motifs. The piece is the first commercially produced Scottish cashmere Fair Isle ever made. It exists because Marie and I spent over a year together calibrating yarn count, tension, colour ways and weight to make it possible. Every time I wear mine I feel a sense of pride in preserving something fragile and worth keeping.

On Guernsey, the work is in the hands of Arthur, who is in his eightieth year around the sun. He’s spent sixty of them in textile manufacturing. After retiring from a career that included supplying knitwear to Next on a national scale, having a piece displayed at the Guggenheim in New York, and a number of royal visits along the way, he retired to Guernsey 20 years ago bringing two of his machines for the love of it. I frequently drive up to the factory on Saturday mornings to watch him work and listen to him talk about his life in manufacturing. He is the most formidable artisan I have ever known. The first Scottish-cashmere Guernsey took months of trial: the gauge, the tension, the weight, the way the wet-finishing released the cashmere from its knitted density. A finished Guernsey weighs approximately one kilogram. Industry veterans who handle it remark on its couture-like quality. That’s all Arthur's knowledge, expressed in fibre.

In Hawick, the cashmere yarn comes into a town that has been a knitwear capital for two hundred years. There is no special pleading needed. Hawick does the work because Hawick has always done the work, and the people who do it know what they are doing in a way that no apprenticeship programme could replicate from a standing start. That intellectual property, woven into every ply, present in every stitch, is worth its weight in gold.

This is what the artisan element is, in practice: specific people, in specific places, doing specific work that connects them to a tradition that predates them and depends on them to continue. When I place yarn into the hands of Marie or Arthur, the brand becomes a small instrument of that continuity. The customer who buys the finished piece becomes part of it too.