Provenance · September 1, 2026 · 8 min read
From Angora, with Mohair
How a goat from the hills around Ankara ended up clothing the gentlemen of Bradford.
In the nineteenth century the worsted mills of Yorkshire ran on a fibre they couldn't grow themselves. It came from the Angora goat, whose home was the high plateau around Ankara, the city the English then called Angora.
Bales went by camel to the Black Sea, then by steamer to Liverpool. Spun and woven in Bradford, the mohair became the lustrous cloth of Savile Row dinner jackets and summer suits.
Our Ankara cardigan closes that circle. We buy kid mohair from three herding families near Beypazarı, then have it spun and knitted a short drive away, so the fibre that once travelled 4,000 km now travels about eighty.
The families are named on the label. Knowing whose hands a cardigan passed through is a good reason to wear it for thirty years.