Thumper’s Admonition, I’ve been reminding myself the last few days.
But oh man this is such a howler of a mansplainer.
A cotton and ramie sweater from the ’80’s is good quality because it doesn’t pill much.
I can’t think of any cotton sweater I’ve ever had pilling.
This wool sweater (picture on left) has been worn by two generations!
Yeah, your mom wore that till one of her kids put it through the wash and now the body’s shrunk with the arms gone gorilla by comparison and your little sister wears it now. AmIright? Wool sweaters and high belly button exposures don’t normally go in the same season.
Manufacturers wash sweaters again and again like distressed jeans to soften them but it makes them wear out faster!
What manufacturer? Where? Has anyone ever heard of that? Yes a few bespoke ones will wash the mill oils out of the animal fiber yarns so that the customer will get the full effect of the softness they’re paying for. That coating is for keeping stray fibers from blowing all over the mill, but it feels like dried hair mousse (or whatever they call glop-for-hair now) so that’s something you want them to do. Again, that’s to remove part of the manufacturing process from the natural fiber and I can assure him they only do it once.
Then he goes on to say that the older the wool sweater, the softer. See this old Norwegian one? It’s soft because it’s old.
Absolute horsefeathers. If we dig a wooly mammoth out of the permafrost we should be able to just about melt into its butteriness, right?
Age has nothing to do with it. You cannot make it softer by wearing it more.
Wool’s softness depends on the micron count of the fibers, with much varying between sheep breeds and on how tightly it’s spun. I once made a bit of angora rabbit feel like the roughest burlap on my wheel. Putting twist into fibers is how you make yarn in the first place: you add friction to hold them together. The more twist, the rougher feel but also the less pilling, the harder it will wear and the less soft it will be. It is a direct tradeoff that every cashmere manufacturer in particular has to make on how they want to present their wares to their customers. Longevity? Or immediate swooning at first touch? With good hand washing either one should be fine.
He mentions sending it to the dry cleaner to keep it clean. I have a number of $5-10 thrifted cashmere sweaters that came my way because someone did exactly that.
Dry cleaning wrecks the softness of cashmere. A very careful hand washing restores it. Like magic. A second hand washing even more so. Water+temperature change+agitation=felting. That means use lukewarm water, NOT cold despite anything anyone ever told you. Lower it into the soapy, still water, let it soak, raise it back out, fill the sink with rinse water without letting the water pour over the sweater–that counts as agitation–and lower it back into the now-full sink again. Lukewarm lukewarm lukewarm, I can’t stress it enough. Roll it in a white towel to get the water out.
You can spin it out in the washer *if* the water won’t spray on it, but the force of the twirl will encourage any fiber ends to fluff out of the yarn. A friend of mine who went with the washer kind of half-bemoaned that her cashmere looked like angora rabbit now and to her eye less professional wear when she wanted to be taken seriously as a lawyer.
Etc. Most of you all know all that, I know.
He recommends merino or (blink) shetland wool as a substitute for cashmere if you want something soft.
Now, historically one of the reasons for raising Shetlands was the variability within individual fleeces and their dual coat, rare in domesticated sheep. The neck hair was for the finest, softest fit-for-a-queen (literally, historically) lace shawl that you could pull through a wedding ring with the fiber as fine as 10 microns, and I’m sure that’s where the notion that shetland is soft comes from. Cashmere is under 19 microns, often 15-17. The rest of the Shetland is in the mid-20’s on up to as much as 35.
That scratchiness and the guard hairs help keep you warm when it’s really really cold. I never knew that scratchy wool was a plus till I lived in New Hampshire, but one -27F day taught me things I’d never known. Anything to keep your blood flowing near the surface. So go stab your skin a little.
I moved to California instead.
Anyway, so you have a male writer quoting a male blogger and trying to explain how to pick out a quality sweater, and his editor was surely male, too.
Because it clearly never occurred to them to run his piece past Robin Givhan there. Who wrote about fashion and style so well that she got promoted to more general commentary. She might be able to tell them something about choosing clothes well.
But she is female. And she is black.
And so the guy wrote this absolutely ridiculous piece full of misinformation that he was sure was true because what could she or any other woman who’s ever bought a sweater ever have told him?
And they put not only put it on the front page, they put it in their Optimist newsletter to get it a bigger audience.
At that point it was, I’m sorry, Thumper. But I’m sure you understand.