I enjoyed reading this article from The Atlantic about why storebought sweaters are so awful, mostly because as a knitter, I know what to do about it.
The author, Amanda Mull, was prompted to look into the knitwear industry thanks to a tweet (do we call it an X now? I don’t know) calling for a “national conversation” on the decline in knitwear quality over the past 20 years. The post was about a sweater Billy Crystal wore in When Harry Met Sally and the terrible (though expensive) counterpart Ben Schwartz wore to re-create the look.
Update: Ironically one of the projects in the Knitty surprise for deep fall 2023 was an Aran knit sweater, When Harry Met Lucy by Paul Haesemeyer, inspired in part by that very sweater.
There’s a lot of reasons knits are awful these days, Mull discovered, including fast fashion, how cheap acrylic fiber is and how much fashion companies both high and low end love profit.
The vast majority of sweaters produced today, even those that may be marketed as wool or cashmere, have some kind of acrylic or nylon (read: plastic) content, and actually a lot of yarn does, too. Of course you can find pure wool and other natural fibers, but a lot of times acrylic is added to the mix to make yarn machine washable.
That’s another factor in people not purchasing wool sweaters even if they could find them: people who aren’t yarn crafters typically aren’t doing a lot of laundry by hand.
The good news is we have the tools at our disposal to make our own wonderful sweaters, and to choose to make them with natural fibers if we want. Fast fashion is easy but those sweaters don’t feel good and they don’t last. So much better to make your own and care for it so you will continue to enjoy it for many, many years. And even if you’ve never knit a sweater before, you probably have all the skills you need to do it. (And it’s a great thing to learn for winter if you’re in the part of the world heading into that season.)
Have sweater knitting questions? Drop them in the comments and I’ll do the best I can to answer them!
[Photo via Film Updates on X]
