How to Find the Perfect Cashmere Sweater

If Scotland or Mongolia is mentioned on the tag, you're on the right track.

There is a reason that cashmere is a winter wardrobe staple—it’s soft, warm, lightweight, and elegant, making it indispensable during the coldest months when venturing outside becomes both a chore and a requirement for mental sanity.

Yet despite the recent boom in affordable, lower-quality cashmere goods from stores like Uniqlo, Zara, and Joe Fresh, cashmere still remains a sought after commodity that connotes luxury regardless of quality. And as more and more stores sell cashmere goods, the options can be downright dizzying when it comes to finding that perfectly soft cashmere sweater. With so many choices—many of which are expensive—the trick is knowing what to look for before you shop.

“Creamy is the best word to describe it. It should always feel creamy, heavy, dense, hefty. It feels fluid and it moves,” says Carolyn Yim, the designer of Plyknits, a line of swoon-worthy cashmere leggings and tops. “If you go into somewhere like Zara, you can feel that it’s just kind of dry. A cashmere sweater should feel almost springy when you squeeze it.”

Cashmere used to be of much higher quality across the board before it became a fast fashion staple. Until fairly recently, it remained a prohibitively expensive material, exported from Kashmir to Western Europe, where it was a weather-appropriate status symbol for the well to do. With this in mind, Yim suggests going to a vintage store before you start shopping to get a sense of what to look for.

“Go to vintage stores and get that tactile feel, and then you’ll be able to feel what a good quality cashmere should feel like when you buy it new,” she recommends.

Yim, whose family has been in knitwear manufacturing for three generations in her native Hong Kong, explained the many steps cashmere goes through before it becomes an item of clothing.

It starts in mountainous regions like the Gobi Desert, a large area that stretches from northern China to southern Mongolia, with extreme temperature fluctuations, where goats grow fine, soft, hair in the winter underneath their coarse outer coats to insulate themselves from the bitter cold. In the spring and summer, when the goats molt, the hair is combed and harvested. Considering the labor and relatively small supply—each goat only produces enough material for around one scarf each year—it’s no wonder that it remained such an expensive material for so long.

You want the cuffs and bottom rib to lie flat, without puckering. A crew neck should be a perfect semicircle, not a u-shape.


Today, most cashmere hails from Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China, Outer Mongolia, and Afghanistan. Small variations in temperature and topography, as well as the scale of production, affect the final product. The length and width of each individual hair matters. Longer, finer hairs result in stronger yarn that is less likely to become fuzzy and break.

“The most important factor in the quality of cashmere is the length and fineness of the fibers,” advises the Cashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute. “Garments made with long and thin fibers pill less and maintain their shape better than cheaper, lower quality cashmere and will get better with each wash.”

The skill with which the raw cashmere is spun into yarn also matters, and, although it is difficult for a consumer to know exactly which mill made the yarn, top-quality cashmere generally comes from towns such as Biella, Italy and Hawick, Scotland where mills have been manufacturing cashmere for generations.

The easiest way for a consumer to judge the quality of the product is by feeling for density. Cheaper products use a looser tension, since a tighter tension requires more yarn. An added benefit for the manufacturer to using a looser tension, however, is that it feels softer in the store but is more likely to pill and warp later. Meanwhile, a tighter tension takes more yarn to make, which ups the cost. Getting that tension just right, however, is important. You want the cuffs and bottom rib to lie flat, without puckering. A crew neck should be a perfect semicircle, not a u-shape.

For woven products, cashmere accessories designer Payal Luthra recommends looking out for a natural sheen. “A slight sheen means high quality,” says Luthra, whose eponymous line of chic scarves and shawls has been getting rave reviews.

Like Yim, Luthra says inexpensive cashmere will have a different “handfeel”—an industry term that literally just means the way that the fabric feels. “It’s easy to buy cheaper cashmere thinking that it will be as good, but there are a lot of differences in quality,” she says. “It’s not always apparent to the eye, but you can feel it. And obviously, you should feel the warmth right away.”

And isn’t that the whole point? If high-quality, long-lasting cashmere makes a cold winter a little more bearable it’s well worth the investment.