Knitwear, and the price of a good jumper

Pilling gets blamed on washing. It is mostly decided long before that, by the length of the fibres spun into the yarn and by how tightly they were twisted together. Staple length, ply and gauge tell you more about how a jumper will age than the fibre name printed on the label, and the last of them is visible at the shoulder.

A pill is a knot of loose fibre ends that have worked their way to the surface and tangled under friction, at the cuff, under the arm, wherever a bag strap sits. Short fibres give a yarn many more ends per centimetre of surface, and each end is anchored by less length inside the twist, so it migrates out sooner. Long fibres give fewer ends, better held. That is the whole mechanism. No washing regime alters it, and the softest jumper in the shop is often the one shedding fastest, because loose spinning and short fibre both read as softness in the hand. Good cashmere is a long fibre by the standards of its own kind, roughly thirty two to thirty six millimetres of underdown at fourteen to sixteen microns. Cheap cashmere is the same animal sorted differently: shorter combings, sometimes twenty six millimetres or less, sometimes blended with regenerated fibre pulled back from waste yarn. It is still legally cashmere. Lambswool from a first shearing runs fifty to seventy millimetres at twenty to twenty four microns. Coarser to the hand on the first wearing, and considerably more durable for years afterwards. Ply is the number of single yarns twisted together, and it does more work than the fibre name. A two ply lambswool knitted at a firm gauge holds its fibres under real twist; a single ply cashmere knitted loose does not. Two useful checks in the shop: weight, since a two ply crewneck in a medium sits around three hundred and fifty to four hundred and fifty grams, while a single ply is nearer two hundred, and light, since a fabric you can read your hand through has been knitted open to save yarn.

Spinning decides how a jumper ages. Making decides whether it keeps its shape while it does, and that half is open to inspection with your hands in the shop, at the one place a knitted garment gives itself away fastest, which is the shoulder.

Fully fashioned means the panels were knitted to shape rather than cut to shape. As the machine works up the armhole it drops needles at the edges, narrowing the panel stitch by stitch, and each decrease leaves a mark: a short diagonal of paired stitches running a centimetre or so inside the seam, usually three or four of them stacked at the armhole and again at the shoulder. Turn the sleeve head to the light and you will find them, small chevrons in the knit itself. They are structural, not decoration, and they mean every stitch in that panel is closed. Cut and sew is the alternative. Yardage is knitted flat, panels are cut out of it with a blade and the raw edges are overlocked together. The seam is thicker, there are no fashion marks, and every cut course is a row of severed loops held only by the overlock thread, which is why such jumpers shed at the armhole and grow at the shoulder after a few washes. Check the collar too. A linked collar is joined loop through loop in a fine unbroken chain and lies flat; a sewn one shows a folded band of fabric and a line of lockstitch, and it will ripple. A fully fashioned two ply lambswool crewneck costs a hundred and twenty to a hundred and eighty euros. A cut and sew single ply cashmere costs ninety, feels better for a month and is finished in a season. This is not nostalgia for old knitting. Plenty of vintage jumpers were coarse, badly finished and cut at the shoulder like anything else, and good cashmere remains one of the finest things you can put on a body. The word has simply come loose from the fibre, and the shoulder seam has not.