textiles

Silk comes from a caterpillar that spins a single filament up to 1,500 metres long, eats almost nothing but mulberry leaves and can no longer live in the wild. That biology, not marketing, is why silk costs what it does.

A cashmere sweater starts as a pound of fluff combed from a goat in a cold, dry steppe. The biology, the processing, and the ecology all push the price up.