FISHERMAN sweater

Why it is renowned

The fisherman's sweater, known in the factory as the 175, is a plain wool sweater with a high neck and the house's bestseller.¹ When Monocle visited, the machines knitting it ran around the clock and still could not keep up, and almost half of the 75 shops selling it were outside Scandinavia.¹ In the 1970s almost every Danish child had one or one of its many imitations.¹

The story

The house dates the design to 1923.² The sweater took its form from English hand-knitted sweaters with the same bobbles.³ Each bobble raises the surface of the knit and traps a small pocket of still air, so it gives warmth with the least wool; the sleeve is set straight so the parts can be knitted as whole panels and joined with little waste.³ Søren Nielsen Skyt made the knitting machines of his day reproduce it, adjusting stitch counts and the tension of the cams until the bobble held.³ It is still knitted to his recipe, with fixed rules for the number and placement of the bobbles and the proportions between the measurements.³

It was made for the sea and for work in cold and wind.³ In winter fishermen wore three at once, the newest outside, and replaced the oldest each year.¹ Today it comes with a high neck or a crew neck, with a half zip or a full zip, in navy blue, black, natural white and dannebrog red.⁴