The mottled sweatshirt

A GRAY MOTTLED SWEATSHIRT

Yes ! I want this sweatshirt gray! said one of my clients. Gray goes with everything! It's up to you to make it a cheerful, bright, original gray! I chose an ecru cotton jersey from Toki speckled with a light “charcoal” speckling which gives a gray but blurred finish, blurred in the style of vaporous Italian sfumato. The knitting stitch is so decorative that at first you think it is a knitted sweater and not a sewn sweatshirt. The relief of the material and the sfumato speckling are the two assets of charm and originality which give this sweatshirt a look like no other.

THE THOUSAND GRAYS OF TEXTURE

Under the effect of light, the textured material offers gray an infinite field of variations, from simple modulation to metamorphosis. The texture lightens on the side where it catches the day and creates a shadow on the opposite side. The gray is no longer uniform, neither over the entire garment, nor over time. Depending on the brightness of the place, depending on our movements, it takes on ephemeral shades, silver, slate, pearl...

THE SPECKLED YARN

Creating an original speckling is not an easy task: before spinning, a small quantity of cotton fibers are dyed in charcoal and mixed with all the unbleached fibers which will be used to make the yarn. Thus, randomly during spinning, strands of charcoal fibers appear here and there on certain sections of the yarn and, at the time of knitting, they give the fabric its random, irregular and non-mechanical gray speckled appearance. No two sweatshirts will be identical.

KNIT SLOWLY

Jersey is made by machines, heirs of the old tsuri, which knit the right side and the back of the fleece at the same time. Their slowness could be a fault but, in reality, their careful approach spares the precious raw material of the fabric: the fibers are not tight against each other, they keep air between them, the fabric is softer, more lightweight and more comfortable to wear. Everything is done to ensure that the fabric remains stable and unchanged. In shrinkage tests, jersey shows less than 5%. It's a brilliant revenge of slow wear on a certain frenetic fashion that always wants to go faster at the expense of quality.

AN ARTISANAL TRADITION

It is the company Toki-Sen-I, in Osaka, which manufactures the fabric for our Gray Mottled Sweat, as it makes that for our “honeycomb” sweatshirts and hoodies. Toki-Sen-I is not a company like any other: while most industries are modernizing to increase their productivity, the boss of Toki wants to keep his venerable and slow machines because they produce very beautiful fabrics that remain fluid and do not deform. And sometimes, because all his machines are busy, he makes us wait one or two weeks longer to deliver the fabrics we ordered from him. The company is average (40 people), it does not have an advertising department and does not seek to be famous. “It’s our clients who are, we say at Toki: Chanel, Balmain, Saint Laurent, etc… and some young designers…”.