Everything You Need to Know About Nomin Batbayar's Nomad-Cut Cashmere

The air conditioning in Suite 6 died at nine, so Nomin Batbayar is selling cashmere coats to six buyers at 31 degrees, with the door propped open onto a loading bay. Nobody has taken a coat off the rail. Everybody has touched one.

Here is what you need to know. The nomad cut is a wrap coat with no shoulder seam. The cloth falls from the neck in one piece, crosses at the ribs and closes at the right hip with a knotted cord. The sleeve runs two centimetres past the knuckle. Fold it back and it becomes a pocket.

The yarn is the second thing. Batbayar uses undyed combed fleece, 14.5 micron, spun at a family mill she declines to name. Then come the colours: brick, mustard, a green that looks like the bottom of a hotel pool. The coat is $2,850. The scarf is $640 and is, in every practical sense, a blanket.

The third thing is the weight. It is heavy. It is a heavy coat in Miami in November. A buyer from Houston is fanning herself with a line sheet and writing an order for forty pieces anyway. I have seen this before. It is called wanting something.

I should declare an interest. Two years ago I wrote that nomad chic would be over by spring. I was specific. I gave it a date, 21 March. On 22 March a woman in a camel wrap coat walked past my window and I lowered the blind.

Batbayar says she did not read it. I believe her, and I resent how kind that is.

She also has a better argument than I did. "Everyone in this city is cold twice a day," she says, folding a sleeve into a pocket and putting a phone in it. "In the cinema and in the car." That is a coat for the 5am flight and the 19-degree lobby. It is not a coat for a mood board, which is where I filed it last time.

So the cut is right and the timing is a joke. These forty coats will sit in a stockroom until January and then sell in a week to people in New York who have just remembered what January is.

My forecast, for the record: nomad chic will last the whole winter. Treat this as a warning.