In the fashion world the ultimate piece of clothing has always been something that’s made to measure, whether that’s a Savile Row suit or a couture dress. But unless you’re lucky enough to have — or to know someone who has — excellent knitting skills, sweaters have always been difficult to have crafted to exact specifications. Until now.
Thanks to a number of luxury knitwear brands that have recognised the demand for cosy, handcrafted pieces, it’s finally possible to have sweaters made bespoke, so that not only are the size and shape made for your body but so are details such as ribbed cuffs, collars and patterns. Of the handful of British brands offering the service, the most exclusive is John Smedley, on whose 239-year history customers can call to create a truly personalised jumper. What the company offers is the opposite of fast fashion; after a discussion between the client and the design team, each item is hand-knitted in Hertfordshire from Yorkshire wool and delivered within about 12 weeks, for about £1,200.
The project has been on the mind of Jess Mcguire-Dudley, the global brand director, for a while. The company prides itself on being at the forefront of knitting technologies — it installed one of the first knitting machines in 1825 — but Mcguire-Dudley wanted to celebrate some of the nostalgia we associate with this craft too. “So many of us have memories of our mothers and grandmothers knitting,” she says. “There’s something really luxurious in the memories that are embodied by those clothes.”
Its first bespoke sweater, chosen from the brand’s archive of 10,000 pieces, was a chunky Aran knit featuring detailed knot work. It was made from undyed British wool sourced specifically for the collection. “The undyed wool is so beautiful; it changes from garment to garment,” Mcguire-Dudley says. “It means that each fleece is slightly different, which adds to the uniqueness of each jumper.” Although historically British wool was the driving force of the economy — so important that the Lord Speaker’s seat in the House of Lords is called the Woolsack — markets have since been flooded by cashmere from Mongolia and China and merino wool from Australia. In fact, in recent years so little British wool has been bought that farmers started to burn their fleeces rather than try to sell them.
Thankfully the growing demand for sustainable luxury clothing is changing the picture. Buying British wool gives customers not only a clearer conscience about the carbon footprint of their clothing, but the comfort of knowing that they are supporting the industry (it takes at least ten processes, including shearing and spinning, to take wool from sheep to sweater, so increased demand could create hundreds of jobs).
Mcguire-Dudley knows well how unique the fibre is, having spent weeks “speeding around on an open-topped Land Rover visiting the sheep” at the three Yorkshire farms that supply the wool for the Smedley yarn — a mix of fibres from Bluefaced Leicester sheep, whose wool is comparable in softness to merino, and Masham ewes, whose longer strands give the yarn more strength.
Carole Bamford took a similar journey when she embarked on making Bamford’s first homegrown merino sweater. Concerned that the average supply chain for merino knitwear is about 18,000 miles, in 2019 she bought a flock of merino sheep from a Devon farmer to rear on her Daylesford Farm in Gloucestershire. After the wool is spun and knitted in Annan, Scotland, the resulting jumpers travel 639 miles from farm to shop. “It is knitwear with a story — a story you can truly trace,” Bamford says.
Traceability was also important for Ruth Rands, the founder of the Gloucestershire-based knitwear brand Herd. She found a boutique knitting factory in Nottinghamshire and was “blown away by the expertise and craftsmanship of the small team, and the skilled women workers doing such intricate, complicated work to create exceptionally beautiful pieces”.
Using British-based farmers and knitters has other benefits too, for instance flexibility. “We can redo designs as we get feedback,” Buffy Reid, the founder of &Daughter, says. “We’re on the quest to make the absolutely perfect crewneck jumper.” It’s the same at O Pioneers, where the founders Clara Francis and Tania Hindmarch created a knitwear line specifically to fit over the shape of the brand’s Liberty-print dresses and skirts. Their knitters are literally part of the family: their mothers, working with five others around the country who send designs to each other on WhatsApp. For autumn they are introducing to their collection knitted dresses that can be customised (£500). “Because each piece is hand-knitted, we can do a slightly different hem, or a tweak here or there,” Francis says.
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But the John Smedley offering remains the most bespoke. After the wool is sheared and spun in Yorkshire it is sent to the brand’s development designer, Stephanie Sobey-Jones, who hand-knits from her home in Hertfordshire. She’s a one-woman production line, but the time it takes to craft each item is part of the attraction; in an age of instant gratification, a sense of anticipation heightens the prize. You might have to move quickly to get your hands on any of these knits, though. When Navygrey asked its customers to buy the wool for its British collection before the clothes were made, it sold out. The founder Rachel Carvell-Spedding suggests that it’s because the request added a “bespoke air”.
Those in the know have started to collect each season’s limited-edition designs — Bamford’s latest intarsia knit vest (£445), for example, which has a fairly kitsch-looking cow on the front, or &Daughter’s Winter Market collection of patchworks, made by spinners and knitters in Scotland and the west coast of Donegal. Available for only a few months, the pieces are “snapped up pretty quickly”, Reid says.
That’s because, like granny’s handmade sweaters, each could be a future heirloom. And as Mcguire-Dudley says: “There’s a storytelling involved in each piece that will keep growing as you wear, love, repair and pass it down.”
johnsmedley.com
Five homegrown knitwear labels
Herd
The Gloucestershire-based knitwear brand uses Bluefaced Leicester fleece from the northern uplands of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria, and knits the wool in Nottinghamshire.
herdwear.co
Navygrey
Navygrey’s British wool range — called the Field collection — is made using Bluefaced Leicester fleece or a blend of this and Masham fleece from farms in the northwest of England. This means that its jumpers, which cost from £245, travel a maximum of 200 miles.
navygrey.co
&Daughter
Alongside a core collection of jumpers handmade by spinners and knitters in Scotland and the west coast of Donegal, &Daughter releases a small Winter Market collection that includes patchwork blankets made to order.
and-daughter.com
O Pioneers
The turnaround on an O Pioneers knit is fast: if it’s not in stock, the team will speed-knit its sustainably sourced merino wool into the jumper you want within 14 days.
opioneers.co.uk
Bamford
New for autumn in Bamford’s homegrown merino collection is the intarsia knit vest (£445) featuring a cow design that draws on the brand’s connection to Daylesford Farm, where the merino sheep are reared.
bamford.com
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