Why possum beats cashmere

In 1990, an exotic Swiss-Canadian teenager of purportedly Habsburgian lineage descended on Cambridge in a cloud of cashmere. His wardrobe was unfeasibly organised, shelf after shelf of cashmere arrayed in all the hues of the rainbow. We regarded him as a thing of wonder. In those days most of us British undergraduates were deeply unsophisticated, many of us impoverished. We were just about graduating from high-street polyester to Scottish lambswool. Cashmere was unheard of.

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Life moves on, and who today hasn’t indulged in a spot of cashmere? My wife is addicted to the stuff – jumpers, cardigans, polo necks, gloves, scarves – good God, the scarves. These days cashmere is everywhere. Even Uniqlo regularly knocks it out at sub-£100 prices. Cashmere is nice, sure, but, as Nicky Haslam might put it, it’s common.

So now, after years of playing second fiddle to Mrs Marozzi, sartorially speaking, I may just have trumped my habibti, for I have discovered something that blows cashmere out of the water – possum fur. If you know, you know. But for those who don’t, read on and thank me later. 

Possum fur is a hollow fibre, meaning that it can trap and store your body warmth. It’s reportedly the third warmest fur in the world, behind only the polar bear and Arctic fox.

Mix it with merino, and often silk, and suddenly you have a heavenly natural yarn that is unfeasibly light, surprisingly strong, low on pilling, pleasantly fluffy and absurdly warm. I have just tested my latest acquisition, a charcoal zipped cardigan, at -7°C close to the Ukrainian front line around Zaporizhzhia, and it was simply superb.