This London Fashion Week YshLondon bumped into Alice, co-founder of ethical brand The North Circular. Excitingly, this coming Autumn Winter season, The North Circular will be launching a new ready to wear line 'Sea Cables', alongside their bespoke knitting grannies pieces. Alice kindly showed me two examples of their r-t-w line and I was weak at the knees when I saw them.

The latest concept at The North Circular is based on the idea of the unique fisherman jumpers that used to be used to identify each fisherman. Much like Scottish family tartans, each fisherman had a knitted sweater with a unique knit pattern to decipher each man and thus their identity. The reasoning behind this was so that if, by unfortunate chance, a fisherman died at sea and his body was found, the sweater would bear his identity.

Five of The North Circular knitting Grannies have been asked to develop a personal signature technique. It can be something they invent or a pattern they design or a technique they have really enjoyed; for example Granny Knitter Sheila enjoys knitting a twisted cable, Elaine has a signature cable knit and ladder detail. No other granny can use this technique. The technique will be applied to accessories such as scarves and shrugs. The aim of this is to create a personalised bespoke product. Each piece hand knitted by this ‘Star granny’ will have a gorgeous hang tag attached, with a hand drawn portrait.

As mentioned, the r-t-w line alongside these accessories is created using hand knitting machines through a bespoke hand-knitting factory in England. The british cashmere sweater dress is sourced from ‘Izzy Lane’s Sheep Sanctuary’ in North Yorkshire and is thus ethical cashmere. It is blended with recycled blue-faced sheep wool, also sourced in the UK. The cashmere is extremely rare, yet extremely desirable, and so this particular sweater dress may be incredibly limited.

The ready to wear lines’ colour palette is much darker this season, with rich dark cocoa, navy and greys, with streaks of warm natural too, which ties the range as an ethical natural line. The accessories still include scarves, beanies and gloves but we will see more hoods, like the knights hood and snoods (scarves that can also be a hood), necklaces and headbands.

Alice has mentioned that the knitting granny team is 80 strong and also includes men, there is a waiting list of around 30 grannies and The North Circular are still looking for more! You can buy the S/S range online but there is a waiting period of 14-21 days for pieces - it is, however, worth the wait, as the pieces are gorgeous, luxurious and unique!

Images; Delphine Thwaites