Autumn is the new winter!
This emerges from a lucid analysis of the weather, because nowadays, as well as working on the product, designers have to work on the context and be the first to process change.
To design a knitwear collection in step with the times, in addition to being creative and innovative, the knitwear collection must be strategic. So, it is now well established that autumn lasts until the end of winter and that winter has taken the place of spring.
As a start to the season, it is useful to fill the collections with extra bulky and oversized models, but better to focus on medium weights, light weights and new fineries that come from far east. And here comes a revolution that no one is ready for but no one can escape.
The new season, post coronavirus, and post climate change, calls for new gauges, new machines and new titles! Because if we remain tied to the traditional 12, 7, 5 and 3 gauge, we risk reproducing collections that are unsuited to the market and we risk seeing the new generations become more attached to the new and more modern weights of brushed cotton sweaters instead of knitwear. We have to have the courage to understand the trend and innovate in order not to succumb. So, courageously and with a touch of the futuristic madness, that has always characterised Italian knitwear, here come gauge 9 and gauge 10.The great revolution of the season lies in the title. But are we really ready for this revolution? Certainly the world of traditional knitwear, spinning and knitting mills are as ready as the Holy Inquisition was ready for Galileo. But the revolution does not come when the present is perfect and the future mapped out, but when continuing along the roads of the past would no longer lead us to the future.
“CHANGE DOES NOT COME WHEN WE ARE READY BUT WHEN IT IS NECESSARY” Italian Style Lab
So with fear, but with awareness, the stylistic avant-garde are experimenting with new products in the new gauges. Those who first noticed this trend were not the big bands but the clothing giants who saw an increase in demand for warm, lightweight garments, and easy to interpret with hooded garments and patch pockets. Too coarse gauge made the models in the collections clumsy and unusable, and too fine gauges made the sweaters too soft and insubstantial. How many samples have we made, in knitting mills, without ever being satisfied. Gauge 9 has imported itself onto the market and very few yarns know how to interpret it.
Where does this epochal change come from? Is it really the right time to innovate at a time when the sector is still reeling and has to rebuild itself after two years of economic tzunami?
Yes, it’s definitely the right time, the warehouses of the spinning mills are still half-empty, the difficulty of procuring raw materials is enormous. It’s the perfect time to create new combinations, rework mesh weights and raw material balances. These new refinements will bring to the market a new way of conceiving knitwear, a new speed of knitting and making up, and also a considerably different impact in terms of raw material consumption. At a time when raw materials are soaring, this change seems useful as well as inevitable.
But how did we manage to make the market for traditional pickled knitwear falter so strongly? A market saturated with products? Is it the hours and hours of sitting in front of our screens or is it all Tom Daley’ fault of knitting during the Olympics with his gold medal around his neck? Reality is always the best source of inspiration: unexpected and overbearing.
So while our beloved diver will be going crazy at the Milan and London fashion weeks with his giant 1.5 gauge stitches in links and crochet stitch, let’s get ready to challenge hand knitting with our innovative machine knit, more comfortable and convenient!
It will be a tough war of stitches and gauges, but in the end the only winner will be the knitwear!
IN KNIT WE TRUST!
Concept by Italian Style Lab