“Brad and I had been friends for years. One Tuesday night, I had a dream about him. In my dream, I’m sitting on a couch and I’m looking at him. He’s standing and a woman is dressing him. He’s in head-to-toe green, a bright green, including a hat, and it’s all cashmere. I go, ‘What are you doing? You look like a leprechaun.’ And he says, ‘I just need more softness in my life.’”
As far as origin stories go, God’s True Cashmere has one of the craziest. The cashmere brand was founded in 2019 in Los Angeles by Brad Pitt and jewellery designer and holistic healer Sat Hari, after the latter had that fateful dream. It’s named after Sat Hari, whose name means “God’s truth” in Gurmukhi. Today, the company reports earnings in the eight figures with exponential year-on-year growth, according to a spokesperson.
“That Thursday, I saw Brad and I told him about the dream. He goes, ‘That’s really weird because on Tuesday, I told my stylist that I needed more softness in my life, and could they get me some cashmere,’” Sat Hari adds. “When his birthday came around a couple of months later, I called countless fashion houses looking for something special in green cashmere, but most of it was wool and none of it was right. A friend of mine was at a meditation retreat in Italy and she met a man who owned a knitwear factory. He made the shirt and I gave it to Brad, who loved it.”
“But while the material was amazing, the fit was not. I grew up in India and have a jewellery business, so I have a deep love for the healing properties of gemstones. I thought, ‘What if I made the buttons or snaps on the shirt out of gemstones?’ Because no one’s done that — you can find a button, but not a snap,” she tells me. “Then I thought, ‘We have the seven chakras in our body, so what about putting seven along the front of the shirt for the seven chakras so you’re really enveloped in the healing properties of these gemstones.’ I had wanted to give Brad something that felt like a warm hug. I realised the whole world wants this hug. I told Brad and he said, ‘Let’s do a business.’”
Sat Hari is telling me the God’s True Cashmere story in the brand’s Paris showroom, accompanied by Gilles Assor, whose brand architecture studio 1.1.100 has been employed to help shape GTC’s structure and expansion strategy. Pitt is unable to join as he is on a press tour for F1, but either way, the two founders are very specific about making sure the focus is on the brand, instead of on the movie star. He did answer a few questions by email, which you will find sprinkled throughout this article. For example: “Sat Hari has been very diligent in building the brand in a way that I get to be a designer alongside her, but not the face of the brand. The identity of the brand is the brand itself, not me. The garments, the craftsmanship, the quality — it all speaks for itself.”
The garments, priced between £237 for a pair of cashmere socks and £6,068 for a cashmere jacket, are designed by Sat Hari and Pitt in tandem (“It’s the most enjoyable part of the entire process,” says Sat Hari). This summer, the duo also soft launched a linen line that they are preparing to take to market in September. All items are largely handwoven and produced in limited quantities in Italy, except for the gemstones, which are sourced in India and shipped to Italy to be fastened.
Sat Hari tells me that in the last year she’s visited Italy monthly “to make sure the product is taken care of and that the workers are being taken care of. Everyone is important — from the person who is brushing that goat all the way up to the person buying the shirt. I personally am not willing to pay anyone less so I can give it to the customer for less.” Meanwhile, the company’s website notes that they require “a closed-loop production process where all of our fabric scraps are reused or recycled”, and that they “removed any use of plastics in our garments including tags, labels, bags or shipping supplies”.
And while God’s True Cashmere started with a dream, this interview started with a meditation. Before I hit record, Sat Hari asked the six people that were in the room to join hands in an intention-setting circle. Normally, I’d cringe at this kind of thing, but having entered the showroom in a frenzy after surviving a delayed Eurostar and the Parisian metro in 30°C, I found the exercise useful. “I like to do that intention-setting process at the start of each day here in the showroom, but also at the beginning of photoshoots or sometimes at the beginning of meetings, especially if it feels like there’s some kind of a disturbance, to clear the energy and bring it to a neutral place. Each person has their own thing going on. So why not infuse ourselves with love and light and bring us into a calm?” she explains.
I first met Sat Hari in November 2022, at a dinner celebrating the brand’s foray into big retail with Selfridges, where I worked at the time and where the brand has been selling out since. “The moment someone learns about the brand and is ‘in the know’ about the details and the truly great fit, they can’t get enough of it. It’s been a success for us. Most God’s True Cashmere styles sell-through rapidly and new colourways are received impatiently when they hit the shop floor,” Bosse Myhr, buying director for menswear, womenswear and childrenswear at Selfridges, told me.
“We started really, really small — small and slow. I don’t have a business background. I didn’t have a dream that one day I’m going to be in department stores around the world. I’ve had to learn so many things along the way — pattern-cutting, getting a gemstone into the snap, sourcing material and finding manufacturers,” Sat Hari says with the slightest crack in her voice. “So Selfridges was slightly overwhelming in the beginning. At that point, we were in only three boutiques — Just One Eye in LA, Trois Pommes in Switzerland and Performance Ski in Aspen — and we had no online presence, no website or Instagram. I wasn’t 100 per cent confident that the factory I was with at the time would be able to satisfy the order. I remember that day, walking up the escalator and seeing that whole display in Selfridges; I felt so much gratitude, I burst into tears. Even thinking about it now makes me emotional. From the first day we started, I’d said that as long as the universe gives me green lights, I’ll keep going. And that moment felt like another green light.”
It was around that time that God’s True Cashmere began to feel like a real business, Sat Hari says, and she began to look for someone who could help go to market properly. Paola Russo, who owns Just One Eye and whom the founder credits with being an incredible source of support from the brand’s very beginnings, recommended Assor — a seasoned sales executive who’s worked for Repetto, Marc Jacobs and Maison Margiela, among others. “I felt right away that energetically we were a match,” says Sat Hari. “He got the brand, and that we don’t move or grow in the same way as other brands. I certainly don’t think in the same way as other founders. I needed somebody to work with who understood that I really do follow what God tells me. And Giles does. He checks all those boxes.”
“The first time I touched the product, a plum tartan shirt, I felt emotionally scrambled,” Assor says. “I realised it was a unicorn; a one-of-a-kind. And so is Sat Hari. So I said, ‘We’re going to Paris.” Today, the brand can be found in over 50 selected retailers, including Selfridges, Mytheresa and Bergdorf Goodman. Eighty per cent accounts for its wholesale, while 20 per cent is direct-to-consumer (DTC). The US is its biggest market, though the brand says distribution is actually very carefully balanced across key territories, having intentionally cultivated a presence that protects its scarcity and global desirability. Europe remains a cornerstone, and the founders are currently exploring deeper growth in Asia, the Middle East and Australia.
Stirred by this initial success, last summer Sat Hari and Pitt decided to branch out into linen. “A little after we started cashmere, we had this idea to have the brand be ‘God’s True’, and have other categories beneath that. We picked linen because its vibration is very high and it has healing properties. If you have a skin condition, covering it in linen will help you heal,” Sat Hari explains.
“We were at Brad’s place in the South of France last August, and he felt it was time to do linen. He was saying it would be so beautiful, and also we could do racer stripes because F1 would be coming out this summer. He convinced me, and that day we designed an entire collection. And then we somehow convinced the entire team and the factories and everyone else to put together a collection and we brought it to market in Paris at the end of September 2024.”
But then came the first red light: the orders started flooding in, but the team couldn’t fulfil them. “The one thing you cannot control is nature, and global warming is a real factor in a business like ours,” explains Assor. “There have been floods in Italy and fires in LA, and these affected the fulfilment chain. But it also affected the fabric. And of course there are also all these new rules amid the tariff war.”
“I’ve learnt a lot about linen since last September,” adds Sat Hari. “I’ve learnt that for it to be sustainable for us, it had to be European flax, which means that every yarn had to have a certificate. I’ve learnt a lot about what factories need to do to weave it in the right way. Both Brad and I are perfectionists, about the weight and the fit of each piece, so everything took longer than we expected — a lot, lot longer.”
They decided to postpone a hard retail launch, soft launching the collection in small quantities on the brand’s website, instead. Sat Hari says: “We kept pushing to make this happen, but we needed to stop and listen. It was a clear sign for me that it wasn’t the time to launch linen. I was embarrassed at first — I’d put my name and Brad’s out there, and people were placing orders we couldn’t fulfil. It was a humbling moment. I’m really grateful it happened at this stage in the growth of the company because I learnt a lot.”
What did Pitt learn from the linen experience? “I wanted to just design our linen and put it out in the world right away. In reality, there was a whole process behind the scenes that needed to take place and even then with the time we gave it, there were challenges we didn’t foresee. In the end, the product is cool and this next evolution of the brand is exciting. We are already looking at how to do it all better for the formal launch next year,” he summarised.
The collection they are going to market with during Paris Fashion Week in September comprises seven styles in nine colourways. Given how deeply affected the company was by the mess we’re in macroeconomically, what’s next for God’s True Cashmere? “The future of God’s True Cashmere is going to be staying true to everything that has made the brand what it is today: being different, bold, and deeply respectful of the dream and inspiration that has guided us from the very beginning. From the start, we positioned the brand alongside houses with decades of history, often backed by powerful groups and corporations. We’ve proven that it’s possible to stand out, not by volume or visibility, but by the quality, the exclusivity and the unique spirit that we bring to each one of our garments,” wrote Pitt.
What’s Sat Hari’s biggest takeaway? “I keep reminding myself that this is the Year of the Snake, and anything that’s supposed to shed its skin, anything that’s supposed to transform is transforming.”
I am holding onto that.
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