KNIT VEST — LIGNE

The length is cut short, landing at the exact point where the piece works as a top and as a vest alike. An openwork stitch, swaying in waves, runs slowly across the whole body. Irregular undulations move through an even knit, and the shadows shift with the way the light enters. The hem is drawn in with a 1×1 rib, giving the silhouette its outline. The neckline is finished with a full-needle facing — faithful to the delicacy of the yarn all the way to the edge. The cable cord falling from the front hem is the heart of this vest. As if struck down, or as if coming undone——the cord continuing out of the knit stands as a refusal of the “perfect.”

-Material-

A natural yarn in 100% cotton. Rather than knitting an ordinary heavy count at a middle gauge, a high-twist cotton yarn is used: space opens between the fibres, and a coolness comes to live in the knit itself. Light, cool, and still with presence in every stitch. The wave reads as it does because of the balance between the moderate crispness the twist creates and the sheerness of the cloth. The honesty of cotton, and the invention of the structure. The question put to the material becomes, directly, the way it feels to wear.

-Voice-

In Picasso’s drawings, the line is alive. He does not trace the outline; he turns movement itself into line. The path of the brush, dancing across the paper, catches “instinct” before it catches form. The knit of this vest was born of that question. The rippling pattern is not decoration but the mark left where the needle moved. As each stitch is a stroke of the brush, a drawing is cut into the surface of the knit——worn not as cloth, but as painting.