The Sweater That Outlived the Fashion Cycle

by Christopher Spencer

There is a particular kind of sweater that seems to have been around forever. You know the one: heavy wool, substantial enough that when you pick it up there is actually something in your hands, usually some variation of navy, charcoal, cream, brown or green, perhaps with a cable running through the knit. There is nothing particularly fashionable about it, which may explain why it has never really gone out of fashion. I have owned sweaters over the years that I could not tell you anything about now. Some were bought at Nordstrom, where for years my personal shopper saved me from having to give much thought to the mechanics of building a wardrobe. Others came from places I no longer remember. Most arrived in the closet, occupied a drawer for a while and eventually disappeared. But one sweater did not. I bought it on my first trip to Scotland roughly thirty years ago. I still have it. I still pack it for winter trips. It still fits, for the most part, and it has acquired the softness that comes only from being worn, cared for and kept long enough for the years to become part of the garment.

Recently, while culling thru crates of winter clothes, coming across that sweater is what finally made me curious about an object I had never thought much about before. Why does one garment become temporary while another somehow escapes the cycle? I have spent much of my life around manufacturing, and once you have watched enough products travel from an idea to a drawing, to raw material, to machinery, to someone’s hands and finally into a box, ordinary objects stop looking entirely ordinary. Every one of them contains decisions. Material. Labor. Equipment. Process. Quality. Cost. Volume. The difficult decisions are often not about what to add, but what to remove, substitute or cheapen without the customer noticing. Sometimes those changes genuinely improve a product. Sometimes they simply reduce what it costs to make. The two are not the same thing. Looking at that old sweater, I began to wonder whether its longevity was simply the virtue of wool, or whether it represented something larger: a kind of garment that survived even as much of the British industry that once made knitwear was being dismantled around it.

For centuries, knitting in the English Midlands was not a niche craft or a lifestyle affectation. It was an industry that shaped towns. Historic England, which acts as the UK government's expert advisor on the historic environment, records that hosiery was well established across Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and east Derbyshire by the end of the seventeenth century. In Hinckley, framework knitting became full-time domestic employment, with nearly a thousand stocking frames in use by 1791. The industry was relatively late to become fully factory based, but through the nineteenth century production moved from cottages and hand-powered frames into large mechanized works. The surviving Atkins Brothers factory in Hinckley is an unusually tangible record of that transition: the family’s knitting business traced its roots to 1722, the factory was built in the late nineteenth century and expanded in 1910, and the firm remained in essentially the same business until 1990. Hosiery, Historic England notes, remained Hinckley’s principal industry until the 1970s. That is a remarkable run for any manufacturing system, and it also makes what happened next more dramatic.

By the mid-1970s, the British hosiery and knitwear business was already under unmistakable pressure. Parliamentary records from 1975 show that, for the twelve months ending that May, Britain imported £133 million in hosiery, knitted underwear and outerwear while exporting £83 million. The government was sufficiently concerned about the effect of imports on traditional textile regions that it imposed or negotiated restrictions on major Far Eastern suppliers of knitwear.  A later University of Leicester study of deindustrialisation in the city describes how imports from Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea undercut domestic prices and reports that by March 1975, 88 percent of Leicester hosiery firms were operating below full production. Between 1973 and 1974, 12,000 hosiery jobs were lost nationally, 61 percent of them in the Midlands. The pressure did not disappear. By 1988, a Commons debate on Leicester’s textile industries recorded that the knitting industry had lost 34,000 jobs since 1979.  This was not one factory closing or one poorly managed company failing. An industrial ecosystem that had developed over generations was being forced to compete in a market whose economics had changed.

There is a temptation to tell that story too simply: Britain made good things, cheap imports arrived, and the factories died. Manufacturing is rarely that tidy. The Leicester research shows firms struggling not only with imports but also with changing fashion, aging equipment and the need to invest in machinery capable of producing new fibers and new styles.  Some adapted. Others merged, were acquired or disappeared. The country itself continued to manufacture textiles, but the center of gravity shifted. Government figures show that imports took 13 percent of the British textile and clothing domestic market in 1970; by 1983 the share had risen to 39 percent.  When an industry can no longer win primarily on price, it has to find another reason to exist. That may mean speed, technical specialization, design, flexibility or simply making something for a customer who cares where and how it was produced. Survival is not the same thing as preservation. The businesses that remain are often the ones willing to change almost everything except the part of the product that gives it value.

Peregrine Clothing is useful here not because it offers a tidy antidote to globalization, but because its own history passes directly through these changes. The company says its family line in knitting began in 1796, when Thomas Glover moved to Wigston Magna outside Leicester and worked as a hand-frame knitter. By the 1970s, the business was producing private-label clothing for BHS and other large department stores. Peregrine’s account says that, as British retailers increasingly searched overseas for cheaper goods in the late 1980s, the company moved to a smaller plant in 1987 and concentrated on higher-quality English-made products for export. Today the company is run by the eighth generation of the Glover family. Its knitwear factory is in Manchester, its design headquarters are in Bristol, and Peregrine states that the majority of its garments are manufactured in the United Kingdom.  In other words, the business did not survive by pretending the old market still existed. It survived by deciding there were some customers for whom price was only one part of the calculation.

One present-day example is Peregrine’s Hudson Aran Jumper, a substantial British-made wool sweater built around the same kind of traditional cable-knit language that has survived generations of changing fashion. It is not interesting because it attempts to reinvent the sweater, but almost for the opposite reason: it shows what happens when a company continues making a familiar garment with enough attention to material, construction and provenance that the old idea still has a reason to exist.

The actual knitting is more technical than the finished sweater suggests. A modern sweater may look simple because most of the work has been hidden by the time it reaches a hanger. Peregrine says its Manchester factory uses fully fashioned knitting machinery. In fully fashioned production, garment panels are knitted to their intended shape rather than simply being cut from a larger sheet of knitted fabric; the technique can reduce yarn waste and eliminates some cutting operations, though it can require more time and skill in assembly.  That does not automatically make every fully fashioned sweater superior to every alternative, and it certainly does not make a factory virtuous simply because it uses a particular machine. But it is an example of the sort of manufacturing decision the finished object conceals. The sweater is the visible result of yarn selection, machine gauge, knitting, shaping, linking, finishing and inspection. What appears simple is often the product of a process that has been refined precisely so the customer does not have to think about the process at all.

Wool itself has also proved stubbornly difficult to replace. Britain produces many different kinds rather than one generic “British wool.” British Wool grades fleece by characteristics including staple length, crimp, fineness, handle and lustre and lists close to 120 fleece grades across styles ranging from fine and medium wool to hill and mountain wool.  Those distinctions matter because different fibers suit different jobs. For clothing, wool’s structure gives it several useful qualities that are directly relevant to an old sweater: natural elasticity helps a garment stretch and recover rather than simply sag, while the fiber can absorb and release moisture and help regulate temperature.  None of this means wool is a miracle material. Modern synthetics can outperform it for particular uses, often at lower weight and with faster drying times. What interests me is not that wool has defeated modern technology, but that technology never rendered it irrelevant. The old material remained good at enough things, and pleasant enough to live with, that we kept finding reasons to use it.

That is where this story begins to separate from the familiar argument that we should simply buy fewer, better things. The more interesting lesson is industrial. For generations, Britain possessed enormous productive capacity devoted to knitting. Much of it vanished because the economics of mass production moved elsewhere. What survived was not necessarily the biggest or the cheapest. In many cases it was smaller, more specialized and forced to make its case on something other than volume. Peregrine’s history is only one example, but it gives the abstraction a human scale: eight generations of one family moving from hand-frame knitting near Leicester, through department-store private label, through the shock of overseas competition, to a modern factory making knitwear in Manchester.  There is nothing inevitable about that continuity. Manufacturing businesses disappear all the time. A family name and an old date on a label do not keep the lights on. Somebody in every generation still has to make a product people are willing to buy.

That is also why I am reluctant to romanticize the past. Old factories were not automatically good factories. Old garments were not automatically well made. People repaired clothes because they valued them, but sometimes also because they could not afford replacements. Choice was limited, working conditions could be hard, and nostalgia has a wonderful way of editing out the parts we would not willingly restore. What seems worth recovering is not an imaginary golden age but an expectation: that an object should justify the material, labor and skill used to make it. My father understood that instinctively with a pair of custom western boots that were resoled at least half a dozen times before he died. The boots were worth repairing because the rest of them was worth keeping. A cobbler did not need to manufacture another pair from scratch; he only had to restore the part that had worn away. There is a kind of practical respect for an object in that decision, and perhaps a practical respect for the person who made it in the first place.

Thirty years after that first trip to Scotland, my sweater has become something I rarely examine. I pull it out when the weather turns cold. I fold it into luggage. I put it back into the winter crates when the season passes. It is softer than it was, and I suspect I am not shaped quite the way I was when I bought it. But the sweater has never once asked me whether it is current. It has survived changing wardrobes, changing tastes and whatever fashions came and went around it. I do not know who knitted it, what machine was used or even whether the company that made it still exists. What I know is that someone made a series of decisions three decades ago that left enough integrity in the finished garment for me to still be wearing it now.

Perhaps that is why the traditional wool sweater has outlived so many fashion cycles. Not because nothing about it has changed, and not because the past deserves preservation simply for being the past. It has endured because the underlying problem was solved a long time ago: take a material suited to warmth and repeated use, shape it into a garment that moves with the body, and make it well enough that the owner does not immediately need another one. What nearly disappeared was not the idea of the sweater but much of the industrial world that once made such things at scale. The companies still doing it had to learn that cheaper was no longer a contest they could reliably win. Some found another contest instead. They competed on material, provenance, skill, design and the possibility that an object might remain useful long after the transaction that sold it. Maybe the sweater did not survive the fashion cycle by defeating fashion at all. Maybe it survived because, at its best, it never needed fashion to explain why it deserved to exist.