A complete guide to caring for fine knit intimates — the cashmere bed jacket, the wool-silk base layer, the knitted camisole. Why you wash rather than send out, and how to defeat pilling.
Cashmere is the most misunderstood fibre a woman owns. She treats it as fragile and so she barely touches it, sending it out twice a season and folding it away in terror. In truth cashmere is robust — it comes from goats that survive a Himalayan winter — and the surest way to ruin it is to handle it too little and too anxiously. It wants to be worn, washed and rested, in that order. In this house it appears in three places: the bed jacket worn over a slip on a cold morning, the fine wool-silk base layer, and the knitted camisole that is the quietest thing in the drawer.
Wash it; do not send it out
The solvents used in dry cleaning strip cashmere of its natural lanolin — the oil that makes the fibre soft and keeps it supple. A piece cleaned that way repeatedly grows drier and scratchier with every visit, which is a particular betrayal in a garment chosen precisely because it is soft against skin. Hand-washing does the opposite: it cleans the wool while leaving its character intact. Use cool water and a wool-specific or pH-neutral wash, submerge the piece, and press it gently under the water for a few minutes. Never agitate, wring or rub — friction and warm water together are exactly what felts wool into a stiff, shrunken board, and once a knit has felted there is nothing anyone can do for it.
- Cool water only. Heat is the single most common cause of a shrunken knit, and it is not recoverable.
- Lift the wet piece out supported from underneath with both hands — its waterlogged weight will stretch the shoulders if you hold it by one part.
- Press the water out inside a clean towel. Never hang a knit to dry; the weight of the water drags it out of shape and lengthens the body by inches.
- Dry flat, reshaped by hand to its original measurements, away from sun and any heat source.
- On a knitted camisole with a narrow strap, reshape the strap along its length before drying — a strap dried stretched stays stretched.
Pilling is not a flaw
Those small bobbles are not a sign of poor quality — they are shorter fibres working loose with friction, and even the finest cashmere pills in the first weeks of wear at the points of contact. In a bed jacket or a base layer worn over lingerie, those points are predictable: the underarm, the inside of the elbow, and anywhere a bra strap or a band crosses beneath. Do not pick at them with your fingers, which pulls live yarn from the knit. Use a cashmere comb or a battery shaver, laying the piece flat and working in one direction. After the first season the pilling slows dramatically, as the loose fibres are exhausted.
“A knit is not finished when you buy it. It finishes itself over the first winter — the surface settles, the pilling passes, and what is left is the true fabric. That version is the one you keep.”
The atelier
The cold rest
The most overlooked piece of knitwear care costs nothing. Never wear the same knit two days running. Wool fibres are elastic, but they recover their shape and loft only when given time — usually a full day between wears. A piece worn day after day thins at the elbows and never springs back. This is precisely the same principle that governs the elastic in a bra band, and for the same physical reason: a fibre held at stretch cannot recover while it is still under load. Rotation is why a small collection of good pieces outlasts a drawer crammed with cheap ones.
Wool worn directly against skin
A base layer sits closer to the body than any sweater ever does, and the consequences follow. It absorbs far more skin oil and perspiration, which means it needs washing more often than the folded-away rule suggests — every three or four wears rather than every ten. It meets deodorant at the underarm, and aluminium salts left in wool will eventually stiffen and yellow the fibre, so rinse that area first and separately. And the finer the merino, the more readily it felts, because fine scales interlock faster than coarse ones. Cool water is not a suggestion here; it is the whole technique.
Folding, never hanging
Knit intimates must always be folded and shelved, never hung. A hanger concentrates the weight of the whole garment on two narrow points at the shoulder, and within weeks pulls two permanent marks into the knit. Fold along the same lines each time, store in the dark with cedar against moths, and refold occasionally so no crease becomes set. Cared for this way — washed, rested, folded, defended — a single beautiful piece will warm you for ten winters and look, each year, a little more like it belongs to you.
