In Extreme Cashmere’s new campaign, a middle-aged man called Max practices Tai Chi in New York’s Seward Park, wearing cobalt-blue cashmere joggers and a gray zip-front sweater. Over in Richwood, Paige and Lola, two twenty-something best friends who work in film production, are crossing the street swathed in layers of biscuit-hued cashmere knitwear. On Broadway, Candace, a white-haired make-up artist, is entering the subway in a white cashmere maxi skirt. Meanwhile in Harlem, a dreadlocked man called Wonderful is sauntering down the sidewalk in a cashmere sweatshirt and shorts in a splashy shade of taxi-cab yellow.
Framed in American photographer Dan McMahon’s off-beat, documentary style, the campaign was street-cast in New York over three days by McMahon and Extreme Cashmere’s Head of Communications Wies Verhoofstad. Dressed in pieces from the Amsterdam-based brand’s Edition 26 collection, which drops this month, the campaign shows its colorful sportswear-infused, one-size-fits-all, genderless knitwear to its streetwise advantage. The 16 characters featured in the portraits hardly look like they’ve been styled at all. “It’s like they’re bypassers,” says Saskia Dijkstra, Extreme Cashmere’s founder. “They’re real.”
Intimate and anonymous, the photos get to the heart of why Dijkstra founded the brand in 2016 with the aim of making “the perfect sweater—no concessions.” With two decades of experience sourcing cashmere for luxury brands including Jil Sander and Joseph, and a deadpan, ‘seen-it-all’ sense of humor to go with it, Dijkstra describes the technical process of nailing knitwear as “quite easy.”
“I just knew I had to buy the longest fiber length, knit it as tight as possible, and not use any chemicals. There should be a lot of fabric and color,” she says. The one-size-fits all concept was trickier. Dijkstra cracked it by making the sleeves super long: they scrunch up nonchalantly on petite people, on whom an oversized sweater can double as a dress, but scale up to fit rangy basketball players (the Minnesota Timberwolves center Karl-Anthony Towns is a fan).
Dijkstra added 1% elastane to the Mongolian cashmere blend, which gives it a bouncy hand and lends itself to less conventional knitwear shapes. The brand turns out crop tops and one-shouldered dresses in cotton-cashmere blends for summer, while bestselling cashmere styles include the Juna, an oversized crewneck, and the Bourgeois, a ribbed-neck crewneck.
What Dijkstra finds more perplexing is marketing—something to which she claims she is “allergic.” When she started the brand, she dispensed with labels in garments altogether. “I wanted it to be about the sweater, and I did not want it to be about branding,” she explains. “The only thing that goes through my mind is: I want to dress people beautifully, to make them feel good.” The brand’s reputation for super-soft, supremely comfortable pieces you don’t want to take off—from sweaters to dresses and body-swamping scarves—is largely a word-of-mouth phenomenon, reflected in growing sales: the business has tripled since 2020.
As for this campaign—well, the only reason she wants to talk about it, rather than just drop it on the brand’s Instagram account, is because she feels the pictures and stories that go with them are touching. “I want everything to be ‘real’. ‘Oprecht’, the word in Dutch, covers it slightly better; it means sincerity. So, if you do a campaign like this, I always want to tell the truth. I don’t want to do something because it sells well,” she says.
Currently, the brand is carried in 300 stores or websites globally, though Dijkstra is focused on building the brand’s own ecommerce. The price point is relatively high—the classic Crew Hop sweater retails for $700—but Dijkstra feels the price is fair for the quality. ‘Extreme,’ as it’s known by insiders, doesn’t do discounting, which naturally cancels out department stores. Instead, the focus is on boutiques, such as the influential LA store Just One Eye, with whom Extreme Cashmere will launch a pop-up bistro on November 15.
The “bistro” element is another personality quirk of the brand. Dijkstra and her team love to cook, and her young, 22-strong team congregates daily in the company’s Amsterdam headquarters, located in a 17th-century canal-side building, for a communal lunch. The brand’s Paris showroom format is equally convivial. Each season, the team brings its own vintage crockery, gingham tablecloths, flower arrangements, and chefs from Amsterdam to whip up plates of chanterelle risotto for jaded fashion editors, buyers, and friends in the kitchen of the Left Bank mansion it hires for sales appointments. “It started with vodka—then at some point we decided to start with food, then finish with vodka,” says Dijkstra, of the dinners.
Something else that’s important to her? Garment care. “How often do you wash your sweaters?” is a favorite conversational opener. She has been known to prize a sweater off a customer’s back in the street in Amsterdam and return it washed and ironed by her own fair hand because she felt it was looking ropey. “When I see people and they don’t take care of their sweaters, it makes me cry,” she says, laughing. “Everybody dry-cleans them—they have no idea they’re machine-washable.”
Today, each garment comes with a lengthy care label so detailed it even recommends Miele as the founder’s preferred brand of washing machine. In fact, when Extreme Cashmere opened its first store in Saint Moritz this past July, Dijkstra made sure to install two washing machines front and center. “We contacted customers we knew [in the area] and we asked them to bring their sweaters to the store. I was ironing there for three days! Loved it,” Dijkstra recalls. “People were walking in and they thought I was the cleaning lady.”
Next month, Dijkstra will be ironing again at a pop-up in Aspen with the specialty retailer Max Clothing. “I believe our business is very much one by one—it’s customer by customer. I have to engage them. If you wear our sweater, then you really feel what it means,” she says. Plus, she gets to quiz Americans on their washing machines, a topic she finds fascinating, having recently been stunned by the revelation that most New Yorkers use shared laundry rooms.
Occasionally, though, her customers exceed even her levels of obsession. “We were in Palm Beach, doing an event, and two fantastic guys came in. They had four Miele washing machines—one for their dog’s clothes, one for the household, one for the baby, and one for their clothing,” she says. “They’re really washing their sweaters. Lovely people!”
