Designer Spotlights
Nine hours, one jumper, eleven machines
Sōng Atelier runs a knitting machine built in 1948 and refuses to let anything else make the shoulders. We went to find out why.
Tobias Reiner8 min read
The Sōng workshop occupies the ground floor of a former paper factory in Suzhou and sounds, at nine in the morning, like a room full of people typing badly. Eleven hand-flat machines, ten of them ordinary. The eleventh is older than everyone in the building.
It makes only saddle shoulders. When asked whether the newer machines could do the same job, the studio's head knitter said yes, and then said no, and then spent twenty minutes explaining the difference in a way that came down to tension.
Undyed, then lot-dyed
Cashmere arrives undyed from Inner Mongolia and is dyed to order in lots of under forty pieces. This is inefficient and the studio knows it. It is also why the greys have never matched between seasons — a flaw that customers have started collecting deliberately.
“If two of our jumpers are exactly the same colour, something has gone wrong upstream.”
Eight and a half hours per jumper, hand-linked at the shoulder and cuff. The atelier has never accepted a wholesale order it could not finish itself, which has cost it money and is the reason it still exists.
