Cashmere - (Ws).

Cashmere is woven from combed yarn collected from the fluff (undercoat) of Kashmiri mountain goats, which live in the northern regions of India, China, Nepal, Pakistan, and Mongolia. According to the current legislation of the Commodity Code of Foreign Economic Activity, cashmere is the hair of Kashmir goats, consisting of wool and fluff.

The term "cashmere" comes from the name of the region of Kashmir in the northwest of the Hindustan Peninsula - historically a former princely state in the Himalayas, currently a disputed region on the border of India and Pakistan, located in the highlands of the front Himalayas.

Natural cashmere is an expensive and rare material. Products made from it are characterized by lightness and are very pleasant to the touch. For comparison, human hair is about 50-75 microns thick, and quality cashmere thread is about 19-20 microns. The fluff for cashmere products is plucked or combed by hand in the spring, when goats moult. One goat produces 150-200 grams of unrefined (primary) cashmere per year. After cleaning and processing the fluff, only 80-120 grams remain. When making one cashmere shawl, the down of 3-4 goats is required, and due to the fineness of the resulting yarn, it is dyed and woven only by hand, usually from 1.5 to 4 weeks, which accordingly affects the price of the product.

There have been unsuccessful attempts to breed Kashmiri goats in other countries - traditional places of wool production: Scotland, Australia, New Zealand and others. But the climatic conditions of these countries are very different from the conditions of the Himalayas, which negatively affected the quality of wool; it lost its unique qualities. Therefore, today the largest suppliers of cashmere down are still India and Mongolia.