Robb Recommends: Ghiaia’s Remarkably Soft Cashmere Crewnecks and Hoodies
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In a marketplace flooded with $100 cashmere sweaters and dissembling messages about “accessible luxury,” it’s a bold thing to start a minimalist essentials line that frames a $695 crewneck as a value proposition. Yet that’s exactly what Davide Baroncini is doing with Ghiaia. He created the brand, which launched this fall—the name, pronounced jhe-EYE-yuh, is a reference to the beach pebbles found in his father’s native Sicily—partly in response to the fuzzy math that makes preposterously inexpensive cashmere possible in the first place: Cheaper sweaters are made from short, coarse cashmere goat hair that feels soft initially but pills almost immediately. Ghiaia, however, uses only the longer, finer fibers from the goats’ bellies, transforming them at a family-run facility in central Italy into remarkably soft and lightweight crewnecks and hoodies. With his back-to-basics approach, Baroncini is betting that people will once again understand the value of simple but impeccably made basics that stay in rotation for years, not seasons.
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