A Fascination with Fabric: 5 Luxury Fabrics You Should Know About
From Loro Piana’s Baby Cashmere to ZEGNA’s Premium Supina Cotton, these are some of the best fabrics in the world.
At a certain stage, those who really — and we mean really — take an interest in what they wear eventually end up obsessing over the fascinating world of premium fabrics and materials.
At the very upper echelon of the luxury menswear world is a small selection of fabric makers and mills that produce among the most rare, coveted, and celebrated fabrics found anywhere across the globe.
While these exclusive fabric producers would undoubtedly love to share their inimitable metres of fabric with everyone, their very particular production processes limit their output to a small scale. Of course, this means that only a minuscule number of garment designers are lucky enough to feature them in their collections, and only a very discerning pool of consumers ever get their hands on them.
Lucky for us at Harry Rosen, we’re among the select few retailers able to carry many of these exclusive and renowned fabrics in our stores country-wide. To show you what we mean, here are five of those exceptional fabrics and materials we are currently the most excited about.
Loro Piana Baby Cashmere
Loro Piana’s Baby Cashmere holds global acclaim as being one of the most valued forms of Cashmere available across the garment industry. To hold a piece of knitwear made of Loro Piana’s Baby Cashmere is a pure joy, but once you comprehend the process of how it is collected, only then can you truly appreciate its immaculate craftsmanship and softness.
The story starts within a particularly mountainous region located Inner Mongolia, a part of the world where signs of wildlife are scarce due to the rocky terrain, deep dunes, and an often harsh, arid climate. Despite this, the species of Capra Hircus — a particular breed of goat coveted for their Cashmere — thrive. Among these families of Capra Hircus, the babies (or Kids, as they’re also known) produce some of the softest, warmest underfleeces of Cashmere in the world, which is why they are seemingly unbothered by life in this otherwise uninhabitable climate.
Between the months of May and June, when the weather is warmer and the Kids no longer rely on their insulating underfleece for warmth, local goat herders delicately comb away the cherished woolen fibers, leaving the goats with their remaining adult coats. Of course, it’s these incredible fibers that are masterfully spun to make up Loro Piana’s signature Baby Cashmere garments, which measure just 13.5 microns in diameter, creating a lighter, softer, and much more luxurious feeling fabrics than traditional 15-micron Cashmere.
ZEGNA ‘Premium Cotton’
For over 110 years, ZEGNA has consistently strived to redefine what true mastery of luxury fabric production looks and feels like.
In fact, ZEGNA themselves have established their very own textile manufacturing division, the illustrious Luxury Textile Laboratory Platform — a group dedicated to fostering and preserving the most precious Italian artisanal fabric mills across the country. Among the most interesting examples of luxury fabric production we find particularly alluring is ZEGNA’s Premium Cotton material.
ZEGNA’s Premium Cotton is a perfect combination of old-world cotton harvesting and new-world fabric production ingenuity. Though cotton is traditionally regarded as a humble material, ZEGNA’s innovative take on their Premium Cotton product culminates in an unbelievably soft and luxurious result. This is achieved by ZEGNA exclusively composing their Premium Cotton garments with what they dub as the ‘world’s finest Cotton yarn,’ the Supima.
Not only is this flannel Supima Cotton fabulously light in weight, but it is also remarkably resilient, meaning it resists tears, rips, pilling, and any other natural enemy to finely weaved cotton. When ZEGNA produces garments with the Premium Cotton name attached to them, you can have full confidence the cloth will stand the test of time unlike any other cotton piece you’ve ever owned before.
Brunello Cucinelli ‘Signature’ Cashmere
Much like their Italian counterparts, Loro Piana, the origins of Brunello Cucinelli’s exceptionally soft ‘signature’ Cashmere begins with those same ancient shepherd communities found deep within Mongolia in Central Asia.
While the individual herds of goats Brunello Cucinelli farms his signature Cashmere wools from might be different to those of Loro Pianas, it’s the same species of Capra Hircus kids that grow the treasured underfleece wools.
It’s well-known that these spectacular Cashmere fibres are exceptional at offering protection from cold — whether for the kids themselves or the owners of Brunello Cucinelli’s sweaters. But Brunello Cucinelli also appreciates the dynamic fibres for their thermal versatility, as they also offer aeration and cooling benefits in sweltering heats too through what they call ‘air chambers’.
As if those properties weren’t rare enough in a natural fibre, the Capra Hircus kids are (unfortunately) only able to produce about 150-200 grams of their cherished undercoats per year, which causes Brunello Cucinelli’s the production volume of his signature Cashmere products to be so limited.
Once Brunello Cucinelli’s team has their hands on the revered Cashmere wools back in their paradisical manufacturing plants back in Solomeo, Italy, they are handled by skilled local artisans who weave the yarns into fabric. These materials are then used to create the articles of knitwear that have formed the Brunello Cucinelli brand’s trademark for producing products of the utmost quality.
Where Signore Cucinelli also cornered the market was his unique implementation of dying the Cashmere fabric. It was this practice of including striking colours to the supple Cashmere materials that made headline news across local Italian newspapers at the nascent of the brand’s life. Writers and clothing enthusiasts alike lauded Brunello Cucinelli’s ability to source, weave, style, and dye the unique material unlike any other at the time.
Agnona Silk-Linen
While Agnona’s storied roots are set in a humble commune in Northern Italy, the esteemed clothing brand now holds global relevance as a leading producer of extraordinarily luxurious garments. Since Agnona’s foundation back in 1953, the company has cultivated a hugely successful reputation for itself through their production of truly world-class fabrics.
To this day, Agnona is still one of the most revered producers of fibres such as Vicuña, Cashmere, Alpaca, Camel, Merino, and Mohair, and once upon a time even supplied these fabrics to clothing houses such as Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain, and Yves Saint Laurent.
In recent years, Agnona as a brand has been revitalized under the guidance of their new creative lead, Stefano Aimone, who took over Agnona in August 2020. Though Agnona’s production of menswear had been dormant for some time, today Agnona walks among the world’s most coveted luxury brands while still championing their trademark assortment of “the world’s finest noble fibres.”
One such example of Agnona’s masterful ability to transform their pillar noble fibres into cherished fabrics is with their modern silk-linen blend. Made using the Agnona’s exclusive stores of the world’s finest silk and linen, both fibres are married together with delicate precision by talented artisans who have dedicated their lives to their craft.
Handmade in Italy, Agnona’s silk-linen blend generally contains an almost equal split of both parent fibres, though that ratio is occasionally tinkered with depending on its application into a garment. No matter the makeup of the fabric, however, one feature of every Agnona garment is an “almost unattainable quality in construction and material.”
ZEGNA Baby Island
Much like this ingenious material’s composition, the name of ZEGNA’s ‘Baby Island’ fabric is also a blend of two components — both with highly luxurious origins.
The ‘Baby’ half of ZEGNA’s Baby Island Cashmere follows a very familiar theme found within this article. As you might have assumed, this part of the fabric’s name is a tribute to the baby Capra Hircus goats, who produce perhaps the world’s best Cashmere.
The ‘Island’ component of this sensationally soft blend belongs to Sea Island Cotton. Not familiar? There’s no reason to feel out of the loop. It’s the world’s rarest and finest variety of cotton.
Take this into context; each year, the world’s fabric mills produce, approximately a combined 100 million bales of cotton. Within those, only about 2 million of them are considered ‘extra-long staple’ cotton, ( characterized by having individual fibres longer than 34mm). This is an important distinction because, in the world of fine fibres, the longer the strands are the finer the end product is.
An even smaller subsect within the ‘extra-long staple’ category of cotton is where you’ll find Sea Island Cotton. Typically, only about 150 bales of the annual 2 million ‘extra-long staple’ cotton bales qualify as fine enough and long enough to be considered Sea Island quality, making it — by far — the world’s most exclusive and valuable variation of the cotton.
Sea Island Cotton is grown and handpicked by a scarce number of trained and dedicated cotton harvesters located across the Caribbean in countries such as Jamaica, Barbados, and Antigua. From there, it is sent to a comparably small number of master cotton spinners in different locations around the world who know how to expertly weave these rare fibres.
Combining these materials brings us Baby Island fabric –– a stunning silk-like consistency with mind-boggling thermal regulation abilities. It has, for obvious reasons, become one of ZEGNA’s signature fabrics.