Eighty grams a year: how mountain pashmina is actually made

Most people who buy pashmina have never been told how it is obtained. The answer is stranger and better than the marketing usually suggests, and once you know it, the price stops looking like a number someone invented.

The animal

The goat is called a chyangra. It lives high in the Nepali Himalaya — Mustang, Dolpa, Manang and twelve other mountain districts — at altitudes above four thousand metres, where the winter does work no factory can imitate.

Cold is the whole mechanism. To survive a Himalayan winter the animal grows an undercoat beneath its outer hair, and that undercoat is fine enough to be measured in microns rather than millimetres: twelve to sixteen of them, against roughly seventy for a strand of human hair. No amount of processing produces that. Only altitude does.

The spring moult

In spring the animal moults, and the herder combs the undercoat out by hand. The goat then walks back to the herd.

That is the part worth sitting with. In the communities that keep these herds the chyangra is revered — part of the household and part of the ecosystem, fed through the winter and kept for years. What it gives up each spring, it grows again by the following one. The fibre is renewable in the most literal sense the word has: an animal, alive, doing what it does anyway.

The arithmetic

This is the whole explanation for the price of real pashmina. Not scarcity as a story — scarcity as arithmetic. A scarf represents a year of three or four animals' growth, gathered by hand, in a season that comes once.

It is also why price is the most reliable indicator available to a buyer with no laboratory. Genuine certified mountain pashmina cannot be produced below roughly €80 to €100 for a standard scarf, because the raw fibre alone costs more than that. Anything substantially cheaper is a blend, whatever the label says.

Combing is a skill, not a chore

The quality of what reaches a loom depends almost entirely on what happens in the first ten minutes after it leaves the animal. Fibre that is combed carelessly, or sorted with the coarse outer hair still mixed in, cannot be rescued later.

In Nepal this has been treated seriously. More than a thousand herders have been trained in humane combing, sorting and grading, with combs distributed across the producing districts, and the prices paid to those herders have risen by around eighty percent as the grading improved. Better technique, better fibre, more money to the person holding the comb.

It is not a complicated idea. It is just rarely done, because it requires paying attention at the least glamorous end of the supply chain.

Where our fibre comes from

REIN sources through producer cooperatives in Nepal that are certified to internationally verified standards, with fibre provenance independently verified. The woman who weaves a REIN scarf is paid €38 for it; a throw, €49. We publish those figures because almost nobody in this industry will, and because they are the part of this page you can hold us to.

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