The Recycled collection
Recycled cashmere
Recycled cashmere is made from fibre recovered from cashmere pieces and offcuts that already existed: instead of becoming waste, they go back to being yarn. Recycling cloth is something Prato has known how to do for a long time, and it is why our Recycled collection started here, in our family's factory, and not somewhere else.
Below is how it works — and also what recycled cashmere cannot do. That is the part that is rarely explained, and it is the part you need in order to choose.
It all started in Prato
Recycling cloth is not a recent fashion: it is the craft the Prato district grew up on. Carded wool was pulled out of collected rags, and new yarn was spun from the carded wool. It was done out of necessity, long before it became something to talk about.
‘All the history of Italy and of Europe ends up in Prato: all of it, in rags.’ — Curzio Malaparte, Maledetti Toscani (1956).
In time the same method was applied to other fibres, cashmere included: worn pieces and production offcuts that would otherwise have been thrown away go back to being yarn. Our Recycled collection came out of that — not out of a marketing idea, but out of a trade this city already had.
How cashmere is recycled
It starts with collection and sorting: the pieces and the offcuts are separated by fibre and by colour, because the colour of the yarn that comes out depends on the colour of what goes in. The material is then pulled back apart into fibre, carded and spun again.
We do not make the yarn: we buy it ready-made from a spinning mill in Prato we have worked with for years, which develops the yarn we use together with us, and we knit it in our family's factory. The fibre itself does not come from Prato: it is recovered from cashmere garments and offcuts that already existed, arrives from many parts of the world, and is blended with virgin cashmere. Our recycled pieces are 100% cashmere, at least half of it recycled.
That is why you will not find percentages of water or energy saved on this page. They are everywhere, but they describe a process that is not ours: we would rather not take credit for numbers we have not measured.
Recycled is not the solution
A recycled fibre has already lived: it was spun, knitted, worn and then taken back to being fibre. Every pass shortens it a little.
As long as virgin cashmere keeps entering the loop, never recycled before, the yarn that comes out of it holds. If only already recycled material came back into the loop, the fibre would get shorter at every pass, until it could no longer be worked at all.
Which means something simple and inconvenient: for recycled cashmere to go on existing, virgin cashmere has to go on being produced. It is not a contradiction, and there is no sense in waving it as a flag in either direction. It is how the fibre works.
Care and pilling
A recycled fibre is shorter than a virgin one, so on a piece in recycled cashmere the chance that pills form over time — pilling — is a little higher. How much depends above all on how you wear it and how you look after it.
That is why recycled asks for a little more attention than virgin does. Follow the washing instructions you'll find in every parcel: that is how you keep it looking good for longer. The step-by-step guide is in our article How to wash cashmere.
That is why we work with both
Recycled cashmere is one part of the road towards making knitwear with less waste. It is not the finish line, and anyone selling it as the final answer is simplifying a great deal.
Dalle Piane Cashmere works with virgin yarns and with recycled yarns. Not to sit in the middle, but because it is the only honest way we know: without virgin, recycled runs out; without recycled, material that is still good gets thrown away.
On every piece, in the product page, you will find which of the two you are looking at.
100% Made in Italy
Yarn we select, knitted in our family's factory in Prato. Our factory