Though neither of us were alive during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when the weather gets cold, my partner and I love to recite to each other in cartoonish voices, “Do what I do: wear a sweater!” I’m not actually sure if Carter ever said these exact words (I’m not finding it in the transcript of his 1977 sweater speech), but they are a potent reminder: In the cold months, your clothes are meant to keep you warm.
Last year, a piece by Amanda Mull set off weeks of discourse about why sweaters are such poor quality these days. For most of my life, I wore garbage sweaters that barely kept me warm. I’m sure you know this experience, too. The affordable, accessible options are generally so terrible that it’s possible that the majority of sweaters many of us have worn in our lives have been acrylic or some other synthetic material. It’s likely many people don’t know how nice and warm it feels to wear a sweater made from materials that aren’t garbage.
A few years ago, I started knitting again and quickly started making my own sweaters. Now I have a lot of opinions about what makes a sweater good, and even more about what makes a sweater suck, so I am here to help you stay warm this winter.
What makes a sweater suck?
The fast-fashionification of all our clothing is to blame for the precipitous decline in sweater quality. This is true of everything you will buy to wear on your body. It’s gotten cheaper to buy stuff that isn’t designed to last for the long term.
The main reason a sweater will suck is its fiber content. It’s cheaper to make knit garments from synthetic materials like acrylic, nylon, polyester, or rayon. Besides price, the biggest benefit of these materials is that they add stretch and are more easily machine washable than natural fibers. The problem is that many are made of plastic, not as durable, and they do a worse job at the one thing sweaters are supposed to do, which is keep you warm.
The thing about a lot of the sweaters sold in retailers today is that they are designed to feel really good in the store and for the first wear. But the ways they are constructed—with the fibers brushed out into clouds, for example—are not intended to hold up over time. Unless you intimately know your fibers, I would recommend not trusting hand-feel when you’re shopping in-store.
If you are going to take a single lesson away from this blog, let it be this: Always check the fiber content on your clothing. Retailers rely on customers not taking a closer look at the care labels on garments, and it’s how they get away with pricing polyester sweaters as if they’re made from natural materials. You must be savvy. For example, if you see any cute names or portmanteaus to describe a piece of knitwear, it’s likely worth a closer look, and not for good reasons.
Gap’s “CashSoft” line is marketed as a cashmere-type of fabric, but it’s actually a blend of cotton and nylon. Everlane’s “No-Sweat Sweater” is a cotton and polyester blend. Abercrombie’s “Merino Wool-Blend Crew Sweater” is about a 50-50 mix of merino wool and polyester. This “terri bouclé” wrap sweater I found at Nordstrom is 100 percent acrylic, nylon, and polyester.
Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but they are trying to trick you! They are trying to pull the wool over your eyes with a load of fake wool blends, designed to feel nice and be cheap to produce and sell! You must be smarter than the brands if you want to be swaddled in nice, warm sweaters this winter!
What makes a sweater good?
My favorite sweater I own is a cable-knit wool sweater from The Irish Store that I bought four years ago because it’s soft, comfortable, and has kept its shape. Whenever I think of the magic of natural fibers, I think of this sweater, my pride and joy.
To me, fiber content is the most important factor to consider when buying a sweater. You want a natural fiber, preferably made of sheep’s wool, merino wool, cotton, or cashmere. Sheep’s wool is what you most likely are thinking about when you think of wool—it’s the warm, sturdy wool that gets a bad rap for being itchy. But I am a sheep’s wool evangelist!
First of all, a moment for lanolin, the waxy material that sheep secrete from their skin onto their wool that helps waterproof it and keep it from taking on too many environmental icks. There’s a myth out there that wool is a “self-cleaning fiber,” which isn’t quite true, but the lanolin does mean that you can wash your knits much less frequently than other types of fibers.
Garments made from sheep’s wool will often start off itchy and soften with wear, so it rewards shopping intentionally for items that you’ll wear year after year. I usually always wear a layer underneath my wool sweaters, which protects my skin from getting too itchy and also adds a layer of protection between your body’s oils and the sweater.
There are some people who have sheep’s wool allergies or simply find the coarseness intolerable, so I’ll quickly run through a few other natural options:
- If you are not allergic to sheep’s wool but find the texture uncomfortable, consider a blend! Sheep’s wool is often knit up with mohair, silk, or cotton to add a bit of smoothness or softness to the garment. Another great reason to check your care labels when you’re shopping.
- Cashmere comes from special goats with magical long hair and will usually be the most expensive and will give “rich executive on the weekend” instead of “rugged fisherman” vibes. If you’re going for that look (and sometimes you’re going for that look!), it’s hard to feel more luxurious than when you’re swaddled in cashmere. Moths seem to especially like cashmere; all of my cashmere sweaters have moth holes in them somewhere, and they’re more noticeable because they tend to be more tightly fitting sweaters, too.
- Alpaca wool is unbelievably soft and has a nice drape to it, so it’s good for sweaters with either dramatic or feminine shapes, and less good for the traditional boxy dad sweater. I think of alpaca as halfway between sheep’s wool and cashmere, in terms of softness and texture. It’s sturdier than cashmere, and also super warm.
- I think of cotton more as a warm-weather knit, but you can definitely wear it in the cold months, too. It’s very durable, nice on sensitive skin, hypoallergenic, and soft. I prefer animal wool to cotton because I find it warmer and I like the texture better, but I’ve seen some really gorgeous cotton sweaters, like this one from J.Crew.
Beyond fiber content, there are a couple other factors to consider, like how tightly knit the sweater is. A sweater with a tighter knit will generally keep you warmer than a loose knit. I also like knits with a bit of squish to them, which usually means two things: the garment is knit up in a thick yarn, and also that that yarn is woolen-spun, which traps more air between the individual fibers and results in a warmer fabric. You usually won’t be able to tell through care labels if a sweater is made with woolen- or worsted-spun yarn, but when it’s knitted up, a woolen-spun yarn will be a bit fuzzier, while the worsted-spun yarn will look tighter and tidier. I like to just grab a corner of the sweater and pinch it between two fingers. If there’s a little squish, that’s a good sign.
Wool is so hard to care for!
I’m sure the memories of shrunken sweaters haunt you, because they haunt me too. What if I told you I knew a foolproof way to wash sweaters that would never end in shrinkage?
The secret is to give your sweaters a lovely little bath.
Before we scrub-a-dub, a quick reminder that if your sweater is made from sheep’s wool, you only need to wash it about once a year. Otherwise, just spot-treat any stains that appear!
Now, bath time. You’ll want to fill up a bucket or your bathtub with lukewarm water (not hot!!) and some wool wash. I use Eucalan unscented wool wash, which is a no-rinse wash that has lanolin in it, so you add a bit of lanolin back into your fibers as you’re cleaning.
Once your tub is full and sudsy, gently place the sweater in the bath. DO NOT AGITATE, DO NOT SCRUB. This is where felting starts to happen; let your garment soak completely and get covered in bubbles. Leave it there for an hour. Forget about it.
After about an hour, drain the tub or bucket and try not to touch the sweater too much in the process. You do not need to rinse the soap out.
Grab a big towel and lay it on the floor. The fibers are very fragile at this stage, so you must be gentle! Place the wet sweater on the towel and fold it on top of itself once to press the excess water out. Don’t wring anything out, just press gently. Open the towel back up and adjust your sweater so it’s shaped the way you want it (arms and shoulders in the right places). Then just leave it alone for like two days. Eventually the water will evaporate, and your sweater will be clean and good to go. This is called blocking! Do this once a year and you will be fine.
OK, but “nice” sweaters are so expensive! Prohibitively expensive, even!
I hear you! It can be hard to stomach the idea of spending $300 on a sweater when you can find one for $30 that looks similar enough, even if it’s made of different materials. If the prospect of a $300 sweater hasn’t made you close this tab already, I ask for a few more moments of your consideration.
First, my hope is that by using these tips, you will be a savvier shopper who won’t be duped into thinking high prices always mean high quality—for example, check out this $2,500 Loewe sweater made from a mohair and polyamide blend. No way and hell no. If you know what you’re looking for, you will be better equipped to make choices while shopping that ensure you’re not shelling out your money for something that won’t even keep you warm.
You can find a new, high-quality sweater for around $100. Prices will vary, but what I’m getting at here is that if you want to buy a good sweater new, it generally won’t be extremely cheap. Our sense of the true cost of clothing has been so warped by the low prices of retailers that manufacture overseas using synthetic materials; I didn’t even realize how much a sweater should cost until I started making my own.
If I buy my natural fiber yarn from a local yarn shop instead of a big box retailer, and if it is made by a small business rather than a giant company, a sweater’s quantity of yarn can easily cost $100–$200. Then you factor in the time it takes to actually make the garment: I’m a moderately experienced knitter, and it takes me about a month to make a sweater. Suddenly, $300 for a sweater is making a bit more sense, especially if the people making your garment are being paid living wages.
Retailers lower costs in a bunch of ways: They swap in cheaper material, they cut corners in the manufacturing process, and they get away with paying workers extremely low wages. That is the conundrum many American consumers find themselves in when they make purchasing decisions: If the cost of an item is extremely low, that money is being saved elsewhere in the manufacturing process.
The good news is that you don’t have to buy new sweaters! Buying sweaters secondhand is an incredible way to get high-quality knits for more affordable prices. For online shopping, check out Gem, which collects postings for a bunch of different secondhand sites into one place. Most listings will include photos of care labels, and you can always ask sellers to post pictures of them if they haven’t.
If you go in real life, you can use thrift trips as a way to slowly train your hands to know the feeling of natural fibers by touching them and then guessing if they’re synthetic or natural. Over time, you’ll be able to tell by feel what something’s made of, and honing that skill will be useful in all your other shopping expeditions.
You don’t have to spend a million dollars to get a high-quality sweater that will keep you warm all winter, but if you were looking for permission to splurge on one, I hereby grant it. Whatever you decide to do, I hope you heed my tips. Friends don’t let friends wear shitty sweaters!
