Himalayan Cashmere Sweaters, Made in Pokhara

What Himalayan cashmere actually means

Cashmere is not a fabric. It is the undercoat a goat grows to survive winter — a layer of very fine, very short fibre underneath a coarse outer coat of guard hair. In spring the goat sheds it, and the herder combs it out by hand rather than shearing the animal. Everything else — grading, dehairing, spinning, weaving — is people deciding what to do with a few grams of it.

The reason altitude keeps appearing in cashmere marketing is that it is the one part of the story the goat controls. A colder winter produces a finer undercoat, because fineness is the insulation. The herds this fibre comes from live above 3,000 metres in Mustang, Manang and Dolpo, three districts along Nepal’s northern border, and the fibre grades at 12–16 micron, which is Grade A.

That fineness is also why a thin cashmere knit stays warm without weight, and why these sweaters get worn a long way outside the months you would expect. Where that stops being true — and it does stop — is on Can You Wear Cashmere in Summer?

The goat is called Chyangra. That is the Nepali cashmere goat, and it is worth getting right, because the wrong name is everywhere: the Changthangi goat is the one from Ladakh and Kashmir, and it turns up in Nepali cashmere copy constantly, including on pages that ought to know better. If a Nepal-origin brand tells you its fibre comes from Changthangi goats, either the fibre is not Nepali or nobody has checked the sentence.

Is the cashmere in Nepal real?

Yes. Nepal has its own cashmere goat and its own high-altitude herds, and the combed undercoat of a Chyangra is cashmere by every definition of the word. There is no sense in which Nepali cashmere is a lesser category of fibre than Mongolian or Chinese cashmere.

The question is asked because of something else, and it is fair. Kathmandu’s tourist districts sell a great deal of viscose labelled “pashmina”, and a visitor who has been sold one reasonably concludes the whole country is a fake-cashmere market. That is a labelling problem, not a fibre problem. Real Chyangra is sold on the same streets, at prices that reflect what the fibre actually costs.

What you can actually check, in order of how much it tells you:

• Ask for the district, not the country. “Nepal” is a marketing word. Mustang, Manang and Dolpo are places a supply chain can be traced to.
• Ask for the micron and the grade together. A number without a grade, or a grade without a number, is half a claim.
• Ask for the documentation. The workshop’s standing position is that fibre certification documentation is available on request. Ask, and read what arrives.
• Burn a thread from a seam allowance if you already own the garment. Protein fibre smells of burnt hair and crushes to ash; acrylic melts into a bead.

Which country has the best cashmere?

No country has the best cashmere, and any brand that names one is selling you its own address. Fineness is set by how cold the winter was and how carefully the fibre was combed, sorted and dehaired — not by a border. The fine-fibre regions are the cold high ones: Inner Mongolia, the Tibetan plateau, Iran, and the Nepali Himalaya. Each produces fibre across a wide range of grades, and each produces plenty of mediocre fibre too.

The honest version of the question is which lot, not which country. Ours is Nepali Chyangra at 12–16 micron. If you want the country-versus-country comparison written out properly, the parent site already covers Mongolian cashmere versus Himalayan cashmere — we would rather point you there than write a second, weaker version of it here.

From the goat to the knitting floor

Threshold

3,000 m+

Districts

Mustang, Manang, Dolpo

Fibre

12–16 micron, Grade A

The route the fibre takes, as far as we can state it:

1. Combed in spring by herder communities in Mustang, Manang and Dolpo, as the goats moult. Combing, not shearing — shearing takes the guard hair with it.
2. Sorted and dehaired. The coarse guard hair has to come out before the fibre is worth anything. This is where most of the raw weight is lost.
3. Spun into yarn.
4. Knitted in Pokhara, then linked, washed, mended and pressed at the workshop in Damside-17.

Steps 2 and 3 are the ones we cannot yet pin to a place. Dehairing and spinning are capital-intensive and are often done a long way from where the fibre was combed. We have asked the workshop where ours happens and do not have the answer in writing yet, so it is listed as unconfirmed below rather than described in a way that sounds better than what we know.

The workshop in Pokhara

Stages

5

Graded at

12–16 micron

Knitted in

Pokhara

Timings

not published

Pokhara sits at about 800 metres, below the herds and a long way from them — the fibre comes down from the mountains, the weaving happens in the city. The workshop is at Damside-17, Pokhara, and has operated as a social enterprise since 2011, working with 180+ artisans, among them single mothers and differently-abled artisans. (The quarter zip’s parent listing calls it handwoven; that word is wrong for a knitted garment and is being corrected at source.)

One maker is credited by name on both $155 sweaters: Renu Tamang, who finishes roughly 22 pieces a month. That is the real scale of this operation, and it is the reason the range is three sweaters rather than thirty. There are sixteen maker profiles on the parent site that have never been assembled into a men’s-sweater page; when they are, they will live on The Artisans Who Make Your Sweater.

The four colours that are the goat’s own

Cashmere arrives in the colour the animal grew it: creams, tans, browns, greys and near-blacks. Most cashmere sold anywhere is scoured and dyed, because dyeing is what lets a brand offer fourteen colourways from one fleece colour.

In the workshop’s own dye-lot records, four of the fourteen crew colourways are coded -natural and the other ten are coded -dye. The four:

The codes are the workshop’s, and they are consistent. What we have not had confirmed in writing is that -natural means the fibre was never dyed, so we are showing you the codes rather than making the claim for you.

What we have not measured

Provenance pages are usually written as a list of things a brand knows. This is the other half. Every row below is a specification a serious buyer might ask for and that neither this site nor the parent currently publishes.

Ply and grams are the two numbers that decide whether a sweater feels substantial, and they are the two most often quoted by competitors. We would rather leave them blank for another month than publish an estimate that a returns email later contradicts.

The three sweaters

Everything above produces three garments. That is the whole men’s cashmere range, and it is smaller than any collection you will have compared it against.

Made from the fibre described on this page. Grade A Chyangra, 12–16 micron, knitted in Pokhara.

Crew Neck$155 · S–2XLV-Neck$155 · S–2XLQuarter Zip$120 · one size

The Men's Crew Neck Cashmere Sweater comes in 14 colourways, S–2XL, at $155. The Men's V-Neck Cashmere Sweater is the same body in 13 — the Sand colourway exists on the crew only. The Men's Quarter Zip Cashmere Sweater is $120, one colour, and free size only — 65 cm long, 50 cm across the chest, 60 cm sleeve. There is no size run behind it.

If you came here to work out whether Nepali cashmere is worth buying rather than which sweater to buy, the short answer is that the fibre is real, the grade is checkable, and the thing you should interrogate is the specification, not the mountain range. Start with the full range on Men's Cashmere Sweaters, or read why cashmere pills before you spend $155 on any of it.