There’s knitwear, and then there’s mohair. While some woollen-wares pride themselves on being sharp and refined, the beauty of mohair is that it’s anything but—with a hazy, soft-focus edge and super-tactile texture that backlit screens can’t really do justice to.
Which is why this season we’ve used this majestic yarn on a small collection of pieces—adding a serious dose of laid-back luxury to our knitwear range with the Mohair Cardigan and the Mohair Sweat, along with a mohair version of our much-loved Burly Runningman Beanie. Made from a super-soft mohair blend, they’re got that classic fuzzy texture that’s just right for crisp Autumn days.
So what is this mohair stuff? Well, like cashmere, mohair is what’s known as a ‘luxury yarn’ that comes from goats, in this case, the Angora goat. When it comes to natural fibres, these fuzzy fellas are quite literally the GOAT—with a fleece that’s tough, durable and super shiny. While they were originally just found in Turkey, once word got out about their silky coats in the 19th century they were shipped over to England so their wool could be spun on an industrial scale.
Since then mohair has lived countless lives, a low-key subcultural favourite, recontextualised with each new generation. At first it was the preserve of the elite, the kind of fancy fabric only the noble gentry could get their hands on, but by the middle of the 20th century it became a staple for Ivy League students and beatniks alike. ‘Quiet luxury’, long before the term was plastered over the internet, a well-crafted mohair cardigan combined high-brow exclusivity with a certain relaxed slouchiness that worked just as well from the wood-panelled lecture hall to the smoke-filled jazz cafe.
As well as the ever present mohair cardigan, there was also the ‘Tonic’ suit—a year-round wool-blend suit made with a dash of mohair to give it unique two-tone sheen. Originally devised for bankers and city slickers, these sharp suits also caught the magpie eye of London’s mods who re-appropriated them to be worn alongside suede chukka boots and military parkas.
While the mods of the 1960s endlessly obsessed over collar-roll, Italian suiting and perfectly cuffed selvedge hems, hunting out quality fabrics like mohair as a secret code for those in the know, a decade later the punks threw the rule book into the Thames and subtlety out the window. Even still, mohair played a part there too.
In 1976 the school teacher and designer Vivienne Westwood and her partner Malcolm McLaren closed the doors on their infamous London shop, SEX, stripped out the rubber interior and re-opened it with the name Seditionaries. Refining her fetish-inspired designs that had already been ruffling feathers around London, Seditionaries mixed left-field details from the history books (think straight jackets and military gear) with an antagonistic edge that came to define the punk aesthetic.
The humble mohair sweater might seem like an unlikely addition to the mix, but in the hands of Westwood they were every bit as incendiary as her notorious screenprinted tees. Knitted using huge needles, the loosely woven mohair jumpers were on the brink of unraveling—the bold block colours making wearers like Johnny Rotten appear as if they’d stepped straight out of a Dennis the Menace comic strip.
Mohair had been pushed to the edge, but even then there was room for it to be subverted yet again. In 1990 mohair cardigans played a big part in the wardrobe for David Lynch’s nightmare soap opera, Twin Peaks—worn alongside Pendleton shirts and tartan skirts to create a sort of hyper-prep uniform that dragged the half-remembered styles of the ‘50s into a warped vision of small-town life.
And then there was Kurt Cobain’s now-iconic sage green mohair cardigan worn during Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged performance. Made in the early 70s and presumably bought from a Seattle thrift-store, the worn-out old cardigan was a few million miles from the prescribed ‘rock star outfit’ of mainstream television—more Alan Benett than Axl Rose.
This unassuming cardigan went on to become not just one of the most famous pieces of knitwear in history—seen everywhere from Instagram moodboards to Manchester murals—but maybe the most expensive too. Kurt might have only paid a few dollars for it in the early 90s, but in 2019 it sold at an auction for $334,000—complete with a missing button, a cigarette burn and a miscellaneous stain on one of the pockets.
When it comes to mohair, it’s safe to say there's a fair bit of history woven into it, and with our own designs we were keen to acknowledge all that, while keeping things moving forward. So although we’ve kept our mohair creations true to classic vintage pieces—with the sweeping shoulders and five-button placket of our Mohair Cardigan not too dissimilar to Kurt’s old jumper—we also added a bit of a Gramicci twist with the option of a digital camo version. Left-field luxury never looked, or felt, quite so good.
See the full collection here.
