Why we chose them
Lanecardate is a woollen-spun yarn spinner in Biella, the Piedmontese town that has been the centre of Italian wool for the better part of a thousand years. Where most modern yarn is worsted — combed smooth and tightly twisted — Lanecardate works the older, slower carded system, and it works almost the whole run in-house. It is small and specialist by design: established as an S.p.A. in 1977, it spins only noble fibres — merino wool, cashmere, alpaca, camel and angora — and controls quality from the selection of the raw fibre to the finished cone.
Carding is the whole point. Instead of combing the fibres parallel, the carded process leaves them lofted and lightly crossed, trapping microscopic pockets of air inside the yarn. That is what gives a woollen-spun thread its handle — soft, full, warm and light, with a faint halo rather than a hard sheen. It is also harder to do well: the finer the fibre, the more careful the spinning has to be. Which is exactly why we went to a mill that does nothing else.
For the Derice Sweatshirt we use Lanecardate's Trebisonda yarn — a blend of extra-fine merino wool and dehaired cashmere — because a sweatshirt is worn against the skin and worn often. It needs the softness of cashmere and the resilience and even, next-to-skin feel of superfine merino, spun the woollen way so the knit stays light and warm rather than dense.
