The outer-knit

The heavyweight tuck-stitch jumpers are back. You can’t miss them, either — for they occupy, almost completely, the precious commodity of space here in the capital’s premier 14-square-meter apparel fridge.

Yep — a real presence about them, these jumpers. They are knitwear as outerwear. “Outer-knit”, as they say in Japan. Why so? Because they’re ten-ply, which equals ten stitches per inch, which equals thermonuclear-grade warmth. They all but render irrelevant any likely downturn in temperature, and have been described by workshop visitors in recent weeks as “a suit of woollen armour” and “like wearing a radiator”.

Thickness in this case comes not at the expense of comfort: the jumpers are made from the lambswool of the finest quality, which is first washed and treated to create a yarn with the rare virtues of a cashmere-like softness and a very low bobble-emergence rating.

The jumpers, like almost all knitwear here, are hand-framed. This is the very slow and steady knitting method of bygone times. Along with its very essence — which should never be taken for granted — hand-looming at its best has the potential to imbue upon a knit a remarkable degree of texture. And, with four colours of lambswool yarn in every jumper — e.g. navy and three shades of grey in the navy-grey colour — plus the aforementioned ten stitches per inch density, these jumpers have nothing if not texture.

They are available now, in navy-grey, ash-grey, and biscuit-grey (shown here). Very warm as they all are, they are trumped in this regard by a newcomer to this year’s tuck-stitch line-up: the rollneck. This is much the same as its crew-necked companions, but ups the ante with a wide-ribbed neck. Takes up even more room at the workshop, too.