Cashmere – Luxury Symbol or Ecological Burden?
Cashmere used to be an expensive luxury item, but now it is everywhere, from high-end brands to fast fashion. This makes cashmere more accessible to more people, but also causes demand to skyrocket, outstripping sustainable production
Fashion has entered a new era where every purchase requires careful consideration of the environmental impact. In this context, cashmere is a controversial topic.
On the one hand, cashmere is a natural fiber, unlike polyester or nylon, so it doesn’t have the problem of being biodegradable. However, like all animal products, the cashmere industry still has a carbon footprint. Furthermore, with the growing demand, the production of cashmere often leads to the destruction of natural habitats.
The issues being raised
Cashmere is a luxury material made from the hair of the cashmere goat, known for its softness and warmth. The cashmere market is booming as more and more people are willing to invest in high-quality products, especially luxury fashion.
For example, Dutch brand Extreme Cashmere has an average turnover of €8-10m/year and is available in 300 leading stores such as Selfridges, Net-a-Porter and Mytheresa. Another fast-growing brand, Arch4, which is now sold in Matchesfashion, Nordstrom and Saks, is expected to reach £5m in 2022, up 40% from 2021. In addition, the brand Naked Cashmere (launched in the US in 2016) has also been a huge success, to the point that its parent company, 360Sweater, was recently acquired by a European investment fund.
However, the cashmere craze has had environmental consequences, as rising demand puts pressure on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the main production area. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 90% of Mongolia’s land area is arid and at risk of desertification. Meanwhile, China is also witnessing increasingly extreme climate change. This makes the environment for goats more hostile, making cashmere production more difficult even before taking into account the increased demand. In other words, the increasingly unstable climate is not ideal for a sustainable cashmere industry.
In fact, overgrazing and climate change have degraded about 70% of the grasslands in Mongolia—which produce most of the world’s cashmere. At Reformation alone, virgin cashmere accounts for nearly 40% of its carbon footprint from raw materials in 2023, despite making up less than 1% of the brand’s total fabric use.
“Cashmere is one of the warmest fabrics, but it’s also one of the most problematic,” Kathleen Talbot, Reformation’s Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President of Operations, tells Vogue. “Cashmere production is resource-intensive. It takes multiple goats to produce enough fiber for one sweater. Furthermore, cashmere can only be produced in certain regions, and the high demand in these areas is causing land degradation, overgrazing, and other environmental problems.”
A more sustainable solution for cashmere
That’s why fashion brand Reformation has been gradually moving toward recycled cashmere, launching a line that’s 70 percent recycled cashmere since 2019. While many have raised concerns about the quality of recycled fibers, Talbot says technology has advanced significantly in recent years, and by the end of 2024, Reformation will be launching its first 95 percent recycled cashmere collection.
Currently, the majority of recycled cashmere on the market is pre-consumer recycled cashmere, meaning it comes from leftovers from manufacturing, rather than from used products. “Whether it’s pre- or post-consumer recycled, the impact is significantly lower than virgin cashmere,” Talbot notes.
On the social side, cashmere remains the main source of income for many goat herders in Mongolia. “In the cashmere industry, the guardians of the land are the nomads,” says Oyuna Tserendorj, who founded the Oyuna brand in 2002. “Cashmere is an important source of their livelihood, so we cannot stop production completely.” However, Tserendorj also stresses the need to slow down the rate of harvesting. Cross-breeding of goats to increase production has led to a decline in the quality of cashmere in recent years. “For cashmere to be sustainable, we need to go back to the traditional way of making it – when there was no overconsumption, when people respected nature and culture,” she adds.
So Oyuna partnered with the Sustainable Fibre Alliance, an international nonprofit that promotes the sustainable cashmere industry, to ensure that their cashmere is sourced from farmers who practice environmentally friendly and ethical practices. The nonprofit’s Sustainable Cashmere Standard focuses on five key elements: promoting animal welfare, protecting biodiversity and land use, ensuring good working conditions for farmers, maintaining fiber quality, and effectively managing the entire process.
To ease the pressure on the cashmere industry, some designers are turning to other materials, including merino wool, which offers similar properties to cashmere but with significantly higher yields.
According to sustainable designer Maggie Marilyn, merino wool is more economical and environmentally friendly than cashmere. “With cashmere, it takes four times as many goats and four times as much land to produce the same amount of wool.” On average, one merino sheep can produce enough wool for eight to 10 sweaters, while it takes three to five cashmere goats to produce one sweater.
Merino is also well suited to the grazing conditions of New Zealand, where the land is too dry for agriculture. Merino has similar properties to cashmere, but is lighter, softer and has the ability to naturally regulate body temperature, keeping you warm without being heavy.
Photo: extreme.cashmere
