The Origin of Pure Pashmina: From the Himalayas to Italy
High above the tree line, at an altitude where the air is too thin to support most forms of life, the Changthangi goat does something extraordinary: it grows a coat fine enough to pass through a ring.
The Changthangi — sometimes called the Pashmina goat, though the name belongs to the fibre, not the animal — lives on the Changthang plateau of Ladakh, a high-altitude grassland at elevations between 4,000 and 5,000 metres. In winter, temperatures fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius. In response, the goat grows a secondary undercoat — a layer of fibres so fine (12–16 microns in diameter, against the 17–19 of standard cashmere) that it is among the finest natural fibres on earth.
This fibre is Pashmina. Not the word that appears on labels of uncertain provenance in airport shops, but the thing itself — a Geographical Indication-protected raw material that can only be legitimately called Pashmina if it comes from this goat, on this plateau, harvested in this way.
The Harvest
In spring, when the goats naturally moult, the Changpa nomads who rear them collect the fibre by hand — combing it from the animal’s coat, gathering the fine undercoat while leaving the coarser guard hairs behind. This is not shearing. Nothing is cut. A single goat yields approximately 80–170 grams of raw fibre per year — enough, in many cases, for only one shawl.
The Changpa are semi-nomadic, moving their herds across the plateau with the seasons. Their knowledge of the goats, the land, and the harvest is carried in practice, passed from parent to child, inseparable from the landscape that produced it.
The Journey to Kashmir
From the plateau, the raw fibre travels to the Kashmir Valley — the only place in the world where the entire process of cleaning, spinning, weaving, and finishing Pashmina has been refined over five centuries. Specialist workers take the raw pashm through careful processes: washing, combing again by hand, and spinning on a traditional wooden spindle called a yander.
Pashmina cannot be spun on a machine. The fibre is too fine, too delicate, too irregular in the way that handwork allows and machinery cannot.
Why Italy?
ITQĀSH was founded on the recognition that two of the world’s great making traditions — Kashmir’s textile mastery and Italy’s design intelligence — had more in common than geography might suggest. Both prize the handmade above the manufactured. Both understand that the finest things cannot be hurried.
When ITQĀSH brings a Pashmina from the Himalayas to Milan, nothing essential changes. The fibre is the same. The technique is the same. The artisans are the same. What changes is the context — and the recognition that these extraordinary objects deserve to be seen and worn by people everywhere who have the eye to appreciate them.