There it is! Barbara Giandomenico found the photo of the entrepreneur from Ulaanbaatar, without whom neither the shop atelier on Jahnstrasse nor her label “Studio 163” would exist. “Your concern is to support Mongolia’s only good export,” says the Munich resident, holding up her smartphone. The picture shows a woman in her late 50s. She exudes strength, and she probably needed it when she set up a production facility for cashmere as a single parent 20 years ago. Her name, which shouldn’t be spelled, sounds as warm and soft as the goat hair she grew up with.
The goats are mainly kept in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia in northern China and northern India. The fine undercoat of the animal should only be combed out when changing hair in spring. The yarn spun from it has its price.
Giandomenico saw a niche in thick cashmere sweaters and founded a company five years ago. The Munich resident sells mainly “directly” in her shop, without going through dealers who otherwise earn money from the business. This is the only way she can offer the sweater for 660 euros, she says. Of course, you have to want to invest such an amount in a piece of clothing – and be able to do so. But Munich is a rich city and Kashmir is in great demand. The Munich label Allude, to which the Cashmere Clinic in Lehel belongs, is internationally known. On the Isar, the name Antonia Zander or the label Another Brand is associated with cashmere.
“I could never make fashion if I didn’t know the building blocks,” says Verena Ebner von Eschenbach.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
Verena Ebner von Eschenbach also wants to work with the precious hair of the cashmere goat as sustainably as possible. “I could never do fashion if I didn’t know the building blocks,” she says. Under the name “Verena von Eschenbach”, the designer sells sweaters for 750 euros, each with the hair of two goats, she says. She also sells blankets and kerchiefs made from camel and yak hair.
Another Munich cashmere supplier is Simone Goschler. In her business premises in Solln she works on the collections of her label The Holy Goat – the holy goat. “For us, color is a must,” she says. Their yarn comes from Mongolia and the Ladakh region in the Indian Himalayas and is produced in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu. Goschler spreads out one of her large, brightly embroidered scarves, the designs of which are dedicated to different holiday countries: an ice cream, a Vespa and the leaning tower of Pisa – of course: Italy. Cashmere can definitely put you in a good mood.
Simone Goschler’s yarn comes from Outer Mongolia and the Ladakh region in the Indian Himalayas, she says: “For us, color is a must.”
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
But the cashmere market also has other sides. On the Internet and in department stores, products made from the fine wool are offered at far lower prices. But a cashmere sweater for 79 euros – that couldn’t work, say the operators of the small labels. The international “Association of Cashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers” warns of “bargains” on its homepage, stating that inferior or stretched cashmere is also in circulation. And possibly a goatherd on the other side of the world only received a few euros for a raw material for which the world market pays 200 euros per kilo.
The goat hair boom has driven mass production, and huge farms have sprung up in Inner Mongolia in particular. In autumn 2019, the animal welfare organization Peta published videos from some farms showing how workers tore the goats’ fur with sharp combs. In a petition, Peta called on well-known fashion companies to stop using cashmere. Because too many animals grazed in too small an area, considerable parts of the Mongolian grasslands are deserted. This led to state regulations, the animals are no longer allowed to eat everywhere, the shepherds have to buy additional feed. And the expansion efforts of Chinese textile producers and middlemen, who regularly bought the raw cashmere market empty, as well as the pandemic have made the goat hair trade difficult.
In Munich, some labels are trying to make the fluff business fair. Barbara Giandomenico says she trusts her producer, who also buys the raw cashmere for her. The almost 30 employees in Mongolia received “reasonable wages”, were allowed to take “baby breaks”, and people with disabilities would also find a livelihood in the production facility.
She would prefer to accompany each animal’s hair individually
Verena Ebner von Eschenbach shows photos: on one she is sitting with a shepherd on the ground, a second shows a shaggy yak, on a third a couple of goats graze that have never seen a fence in their life. She was last there three years ago, she says, in Mongolia. She would prefer to accompany each animal hair individually on its way. In order not to devalue the product, there is no sale. What the nomads do not have the potential to be a sweater, turn it into mats or saddlecloths.
Simone Goschler says she pays school for the first child of every employee at the production facility in Kathmandu. This winter, the Munich-based company is offering cashmere sweaters with a toadstool design and wide scarves in gipsy style. She sells her products exclusively through retailers, where one of her large scarves can cost 1400 euros. Some customers pay in installments, others are solvent enough to buy several copies at once.
Barbara Giandomenico says that she has noticed that people in Munich are very willing to get involved in socially just produced fashion. Because the weaving trade is not established in Mongolia, she has her Kashmiri weave in Germany. A seamstress in Neuhausen sews a coat out of the fabric. In the meantime she has contact to a weaving mill in Nepal, says Giandomenico. But she wants to see it with her own eyes first.