The Art of Imperfection

By Anna Wheeler

I have never been drawn to perfect things. What interests me (in a garden, in a piece of fabric, in a design) is the detail that wasn't planned, the colour that doesn't quite match and is lovelier for it, the pattern that holds a surprise the longer you look.

i. The gardens that made me

When people ask where my designs come from, I usually start with my grandmother's kitchen garden. Her garden was a working one: vegetables and herbs and flowers all growing together, with no particular regard for where things were supposed to go. She grew up on a farm, and the garden had that quality: part necessity, part something wilder. Old fruit trees and rows of carrots appearing in amongst the flower borders. Snapdragons that moved when you touched them. A greenhouse that was always warm, where I spent whole afternoons as a small child making mud pies with soil and sieves and old plant pots...entirely absorbed.

I remember the smell of tomatoes growing in the greenhouse. The roses she had planted entirely for their scent rather than their appearance: picked and dried for potpourri, their petals silky between small fingers. She never arranged things for effect. She just let them grow where they wanted, and what resulted was more interesting than anything designed.

It was these memories that I made patterns and shapes from when I was training at the Royal College of Art in 2000.  When I developed the sketches into knitted stitches Missoni reached out and offed me a design job developing stitches for their main line collection. I was thrilled to see my knit designs on such a big runway shows three years in a row.

My love of gardens as not waned. My favourite ones are still the wild and wonderful gardens. Full of character, full of things that happened by chance and turned out to be better than anything you could have planned and I love the calm of being in them, the way something growing captures your attention without demanding it.

That feeling will always run through my work. When I say my eye wanders, I mean it in the way a garden wanders: with its own internal logic, finding its own way.

ii. What I learned from working with big Luxury brands

After studding at the Royal College of Art, I spent many years designing for some of the most visually ambitious brands in fashion. Missoni. Alexander McQueen. Calvin Klein. Donna Karan. Each of them taught me something different, and together they gave me a technical and creative education I couldn't have built any other way.

What I took from Missoni, in particular, was an understanding of colour and stitch as a language. Working within a brand that had built its entire identity on the interaction of colour and pattern taught me to think about both with a precision I hadn't had before. To understand why certain combinations, vibrate with life while others, even beautiful ones in isolation, flatten each other. To trust the instinct that something is right before you can fully explain why.

iii. The design language I have built

Many of the patterns I create for Cotswold Knit have no set repetition. This is deliberate, and it is the thing that set Cotswold knit apart from other brands.

My botanical-inspired knitwear is built the way a garden grows, with an internal logic but without a rigid formula. Every piece is designed in the Cotswolds with that same principle in mind. There are recurring elements (florals, organic shapes, the botanical references that run through everything I make) but they don't always appear in the same place twice.

iv. Colour as a feeling

Colour, for me, is a feeling. Something I am pulled towards. I gather together the colours that are drawing me at a particular moment, and they are almost always colours I am seeing outside, in the season I am living through.

There is always a green, always a blue, always a pink and a cream somewhere in what I am drawn to. But the exact hues shift with the light, with what is growing, with the particular quality of a morning in late autumn versus early spring.

What I have learned is that I can never be fully certain whether a colourway is right until it’s been knitted. The colours you place next to each other change each other. A green shifts when it sits against a different pink. A navy that looked strong on its own might flatten an entire colourway. I thread up the machine and knit it down, and that is when I know. The first sample rarely works... I go again. The knitting down is the most important part of the whole colour process.

Colour is a feeling. I have to knit it down to really know whether it is right.

What I am always looking for is a combination that feels genuinely original. Something I haven't seen before. Something that, when translated into yarn and pattern, will make someone reach for a piece because they can resonate with it. That is the response I am working towards every time.

v. Who I am making it for

I think about the women who wear Cotswold Knit a great deal, in the way you think about a friend whose taste you know well and want to make something worthy for.

Women who know what good design looks like, who have always bought less and bought better, who are drawn to Cotswold Knit because they recognise in it a seriousness about craft.

These are women who notice the details and softness. Who pick up a scarf and feel the work and love that has gone on. Who have no interest in fast fashion and like to buy unique, considered items in uplifting colourways.

They are part of a slow fashion movement that is growing in the UK, and they are drawn to the story of how Cotswold Knit is made as much as to the pieces themselves. They want to know about the wool, the factory, the designer behind it. They want invest in knitwear that feels good on every level.

They want to feel, when they wear something, that it was made by someone who cared.