Cashin with a favorite funnelneck design, photographed against art and graphics used to inspire her intarsia designs.
Bonnie Cashin for Ballantyne, 1964.

real princess stuff:
ballantyne, 1964-1968

Cashin's nomadic character informed her need for professional diversity as much as her love of travel. Sills agreed that as long as her designs included an edging or "tracing" of leather or suede, the firm would manufacture her designs in tweed, jersey, mohair, fur or canvas, but this did not eliminate collaborations with other specialized manufacturers. In 1964, she became the designer for cashmere manufacturer Ballantyne of Peebles, to be followed by Karl Lagerfeld, longtime designer for Chanel. Cashin spent as much as six months of each year in Scotland overseeing cashmere production. Cashin's "modern art" approach to cashmere featured abstract motifs taken from a mix of sources, including contemporary painting and African mud sculptures. While she delighted in posing her radical design concepts to the staid cashmere industry, and experimenting with the fibers that she described as "all that delicious, soft, sybarite, luxurious, real-princess stuff," she admitted that her colleagues "thought I was a little bit wacky."