Baby cashmere is the undercoat of the Hircus goat, combed by hand once a year, and each animal yields very little of it. The fibre typically measures around 13 to 14 microns against roughly 15 to 19 for most commercial cashmere, which is why it feels the way it does and costs what it costs.
Fineness is a claim about hand and drape, not about toughness. A finer fibre is not a harder-wearing one, and very fine knits pill readily. Buy baby cashmere for how it sits and feels, not because you expect it to outlast a heavier gauge.
Houses that use baby cashmere name it. It is expensive enough that nobody buys it and then declines to mention it, so the composition label says so rather than folding it into a generic cashmere percentage. Loro Piana is the house most associated with the material.
Secondhand listings lose that information constantly. Some sellers simplify to widen the search pool; far more never turned the garment inside out. A piece described as a cashmere sweater and priced as one may well have a label that says otherwise, and nobody in the transaction has looked.
1. Ask for a photograph of the sewn-in composition label, not the brand label at the collar. These are usually different tags in different places. 2. Read what it says rather than what the listing says. The two are independent, and only one of them was written by the seller. 3. Treat everything else as supporting evidence. Feel and appearance are real signals in the hand, but they are not signals through a phone screen.
| Evidence | What it tells you | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Composition label | Baby cashmere named outright | Strongest available |
| Interior photos | Whether the seller checked at all | Useful |
| Listing description | What the seller believes | Weakest |
If no label photo is forthcoming and the seller cannot say, price the piece as ordinary cashmere and decide whether it is worth having on those terms. Occasionally it will turn out to be more than that, and that is a bonus rather than a plan.