The future of knitting: Unmade
By amalgamating their programming, engineering and fashion backgrounds, Unmade founders Kirsty Emery, Ben Alun-Jones and Hal Watts have developed an entirely novel approach to industrial knitting. Kirsty told Style’n’Snitch exactly what sets the award-winning, London-based brand apart from the wool pack.
“The standard production model within the fashion industry is to make garments in large batches before selling them to the customer,” she says. “The volume they produce is based on prediction, which often leads to over production.” Scarily, Kirsty tells us, around “10% of garments produced are never sold and go directly to landfill.”
Since 2013 the brand has used its unique technology to create interactive knitwear designs in collaboration with well-known artists.
Customers can choose the designs, colours and even the fabrication of their garment, ensuring every item is personalised to the individual. “This means that production of each garment can only start after purchase, removing the problem of over production,” says Kirsty.
To enable this new way of working, Unmade have created their own software to “automatically create each order and push it directly to the knitting machine.”
So what’s next for this hi-tech knitwear label? World domination, of course. “We’re currently working with some of the world’s leading international brands to bring our customer experience and manufacturing integration to customers on a global scale.”
www.unmade.com
A snowballing success: Caitlyn Charles-Jones
This talented young knitwear designer has been on our radar ever since Vogue tipped her as one to watch. Following her debut show at Graduate Fashion Week in 2012, Caitlyn went on to win the Visionary Knitwear Award, which led to a further invitation to design a collection for George at Asda. She then went on to complete an MA in knitwear design at the RCA, during which she won the Swarovski Crystal Award.
After a placement at Missoni, the budding designer set up her own studio in the Cotswalds, and has since been creating clean, bold and wearable high-fashion silhouettes that feature unexpected combinations of materials as well as the intricate embellishments she’s become known for.
Check out her latest collection at www.caitlincharles-jones.com.
Rock ‘n’ Roll underworld: Hades
Already a firm favourite with cool kids like Alexa Chung, Hades is a fledgling knitwear brand that’s gone from strength to strength since its emergence in early 2016. Initially founder Cassie Holland began making one-off pieces of knitwear for friends, but was soon drawn to the idea of reimagining the basic British sweater.
Set on merging the worlds of fashion and music, her debut collection featured the names of four of her favourite bands and artists – Patti Smith, The Slits, The Smith and Sonic Youth emblazoned across colourful knitted crew necks. After attracting widespread online attention the second drop sold out in a cool 20 minutes. With a little help from Instagram sharing and a growing celeb following, Hades is now stocked exclusively at Liberty and at hades-shop.co.uk.
Written by Thea Carley
