Loro Piana Light Brown Baby-Cashmere Cable-Knit Roundneck

Discover the Loro Piana Light Brown Baby Cashmere Cable Roundneck. Baby cashmere occupies a category of its own within the house's offering and within luxury knitwear more broadly. The fibre comes exclusively from the undercoat of Capra Hircus goat kids in Inner Mongolia, gathered by hand just once in each animal's lifetime before the first year is out: a single combing yields approximately 30 grams of usable fibre, measuring 13.5 microns in diameter, finer by a considerable margin than the cashmere taken from the same animal in adulthood. The concept was identified by Pier Luigi Loro Piana, who recognised the extraordinary quality of the young goats' undercoat during visits to Chinese herders and spent ten years persuading a select number of them to separate it from the adult fibre before the house could begin spinning and weaving it in Italy. A lightweight baby cashmere piece requires the combing of around nineteen baby goats; a heavyweight cable knit of this kind, with its substantial construction and the significant quantity of yarn required to build the stitch, draws from considerably more. The colour is a warm light brown, closer to caramel than to the cooler tones that dominate knitwear in this fibre, and the cable pattern is worked with the depth and relief that only a properly heavy yarn can sustain, the stitches sitting proud of the surface in a way that makes the softness of the material beneath them all the more surprising. Loro Piana has spent decades building the case for baby cashmere as the finest knittable fibre available to a luxury house. This roundneck, in this weight, in this colour, is a straightforward piece of evidence for that argument.