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THE SWEATER HAS ITS DAY IN THE SUN

Given winter's incessant chill, now is the time to enjoy the resurgence of sweater-wear. Bronwyn Cosgrave highlights the season's best ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2008

Whatever you may think of waiting lists as a marketing tool, once a piece of clothing has the public queuing to buy it, you know something’s up. It was Tom Ford, Gucci’s creative director in the 1990s, who kickstarted the phenomenon with his bold handbags and needle-sharp, metal-heeled shoes, and the current waiting list at Ford’s London menswear outlet is telling. It’s not for one of his sleek crocodile weekend bags, nor a pair of glittering diamond cufflinks, nor even a bespoke suit like the ones he made for Daniel Craig in “Quantum of Solace”. It is for a V-neck sweater.

The item in question—feather-light, in two subtle tones of purple—costs £659 (€735). Nonetheless, men are lining up to buy it. They are part of a trend that Women’s Wear Daily—the authoritative American trade magazine—has described as the resurgence of knitwear. From jumpers to sweater dresses, cardigans to gilets, there is a new, artfully crafted approach to the sort of clothes that your grandmother used to give you for Christmas (and that you took back to the shop straight after). Cashmere specialists, luxury fashion labels, independent designers and high-street megastores: all are selling some truly desirable—and truly wearable—pieces. 

A case in point is Missoni, the family-run Italian knitwear house that has been quietly toiling at the wool-face for decades. In 1997 Angela Missoni took over as designer of the label’s main line, and she quickly pulled off the trick of merging modern, sensual clothes with Missoni’s trademark colourful, zigzagging graphics. It was an approach that helped turn knitwear from being an afterthought in most fashion collections to a standout element in many. I can attest to its power. Angela and I became friends not long after she took over at Missoni, and I gradually built up a large collection of her pieces; her elegant style of sweater-dressing soon became my default mode. I found that, aside from its second-skin comfort, there’s an efficiency to knitwear. It’s wrinkle-resistant, so you can work all day, travel all night, and it still looks good. 

This holds just as true for men. After Angela succeeded her brother Luca as creative director of Missoni menswear, she earned ecstatic reviews for her AW08 collection. She scaled down the brand’s traditional exuberance, showing slim-fitting as well as slouchy knitwear in unexpected, pastel shades. And though some men might find such ice-cream colours alarming, they make an easy, refreshing pairing with jeans, black or khaki trousers. 

Missoni is far from the end of the story. Louise Goldin, a gifted young designer who graduated with an ma from Central Saint Martins in 2005, makes only knitwear—and that of the most inventive and forward-looking kind. Goldin’s AW08 collection included dramatic “fit and flare” mini dresses, body-skimming catsuits and jersey parkas in bold-hued, geometric patterns that mixed cobalt and amber, as well as dusky shades of smoke and onyx; the online fashion arbiter Style.com rightly declared that they push knitwear “into a new zone of fashion relevance”. It also said the clothes demonstrated much “sensible girl-think”—code for “it may be fashionable, but it’s wearable too”.

Meanwhile, for women’s workwear, the Swiss label Akris’s AW08 collection replaced the traditional white shirt and the blouse with earth-hued, super-fine silk-cashmere polo-necks, which look fresh and modern worn above a suede skirt, with wide-legged trousers or layered beneath a mink tunic. Softer still are classic, round-neck jumpers in vicuña—“the fibre of the gods”, sheared from close relatives of the alpaca—sold by Loro Piana, the reigning champion of the serious cashmere world. They may cost a stratospheric £2,860, but you get what you pay for: the look and feel of all Piana’s fabrics reflect the extreme lengths the firm goes to in search of quality, even breeding its own animals for shearing.

And then there’s the cardigan. This humble item has undergone a wholesale reinvention. Gilles Dufour (for 15 years director of haute couture and ready-to-wear at Chanel) has designed a line of women’s cardigans exclusively for Browns in London that are either cropped, fitted and sexy, or knee-grazing and boldly in-your-face. Like the asymmetrically tailored cardigans by Lisa T, formerly an assistant to Issey Miyake, or the chunky, earthy men’s cardigans from the London-based Japanese designers the Inoue Brothers, they add spice to whatever they’re worn with. Equally, though very affordable, Uniqlo’s cashmere cardigans for men and dresses for women are still on the button in terms of colour, fit and quality of fabric.

Some of the stand-out pieces of this winter, though, have come from Pringle of Scotland, a brand at one time synonymous with such fustiness as the twinset and the argyle knit. Pringle’s creative director, Clare Waight Keller, has worked hard to make sweater-dresses desirable again. “Anyone can wear a sweater-dress,” she says. “You don’t have to be a sample size, as they form to the body and are forgiving. And they make you feel special.” Take her elegant black “T-shirt dress”, for example: its top section is made of a fine, lightweight silk knit, but the knee-length skirt is of a sturdy merino ottoman rib that retains its shape and shouldn’t give with wear. Elsewhere the collection is full of details which loosen up and lend versatility to the designs. A body-skimming, hand-crocheted black shift dress with a double-breasted button detail along its front can be worn with a T-shirt or a blouse underneath. An Italian silk-knit wraparound cardigan with French-cuff buttoned sleeves is prettified with a ribbon ruffle at the collar: it has all the refinement of a tuxedo jacket but is infinitely more comfortable.

And there’s the rub—or not. More than anything, knitwear is easy on the body. Albert Kriemler, the creative director of Akris, knows this perhaps better than anyone. “Pure cashmere, pure silk-knit—even fine-twisted wool—feels so wonderful next to the skin,” he says. “It is just so comfortable, and you can create a shell system with it, layering it once, twice or three times. Knitwear fits today’s hectic lives at every level.”

Picture credit: abstract splotcHes (via Flickr)

(Bronwyn Cosgrave wrote "Made for Each Other: Fashion and the Academy Awards" (Bloomsbury). She is writing the story of Il Pelicano hotel in Porto Ercole.)