Spinning Yarns: A Knitwear Round-Up

Autumn is the season for knitwear, and to help you find your perfect knit we have broken our selection down into five essential areas.

As well as providing you with much-needed warmth, a good knit can be either a subtle and textured layer or a vibrant stand-out piece. Traditional knitting techniques and patterns can either be faithfully replicated or subtly subverted and modernised to create something entirely new. Raf Simons is the master of injecting traditional styles with a sharp contemporary edge, and his Fair Isle knit is one of the highlights of this season. While, heritage brands such as Levi's Vintage Clothing and E. Tautz provide links back to the rich tradition and history of knitwear – one of the oldest forms of clothing fabrication.

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Fair Isle

Named after Fair Isle, the southernmost of the remote Shetland Isles, some purists will insist that an authentic Fair Isle must have a limited colour palette of five-or-so colours, with no more than two colours per row.

While this was the traditional method, making use of the natural grey and brown shades of the wool produced by the hardy Shetland sheep, Fair Isle knits today have broken free of this old-fashioned restriction and now brands such as Raf Simons and YMC use the expressive pattern to inject some vibrancy into their autumn knitwear.



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Cable Knit

Utilising a knitting technique as old as the hills, cable knits are as individual as the craftsman that create them. Back when each cable knit was hand knitted, this intricate technique served as the knitter's trademark, offering them a blank canvas on which to express themselves… in wool. So much so, that in small communities knitters could be identified by their cable pattern.

The zenith of cable knitting, the Aran knit, has the potential to be so complex that fishing villages adopted their own signature knit pattern, so that if one of their number was lost at sea and washed ashore the unfortunate soul could be identified by the intricate cable pattern of their sweater.

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College & Sporting

With roots in sporting achievement and college affiliation, college jumpers became popular at the start of the Twentieth Century. Whether it was a British public schoolboy preparing for a game of rugby, a preppy American jock strolling across campus, or a chipper English cricketer warming himself in the outfield, they all wore their jumpers with a sense of pride. In those early days, each star, stripe, and letter was a coded sign of sporting triumph, earned through strained muscle and beaded sweat. Now, those same symbols form part of the language of menswear, echoing the cheers and cries of a proud sporting past; they remind us of energetic youth, team spirit, and victory.

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Marl Knit

There is something innately autumnal about a marl knit – flecks of contrasting colour seem to mirror the changing shades of the leaves, as the winter months close in and knitwear becomes a necessity.

Our Scandinavian brands produce some of the finest knitwear around, and this season the marl knits from Acne, NN.07 and Norse Projects take some beating.








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Roll Neck

Originally it was miners and seamen who opted to do away with scarves and keep their necks warm with a functional roll neck. Yet, in more recent times they seem to have become the uniform of the bookish academic or dandy playwright, rather than the rugged labourer. However, we have examples of both: the chunky roll neck from Levi's Vintage Clothing hints at the roll neck's functional origins, while refined versions by Jil Sander and Mugler offer an elegant version of this versatile autumn essential.






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