Every Cardigan We Had Ever Sold Was for Staying In. The Albertine Was My Answer to That.

Six things I held out for on an open layer, why it had to be crochet rather than knit, and why it is going out at £41.95.

My name is Emma. My sister Alison and I have run our shop just off the green in Richmond for eleven years, and for most of those years we sold cardigans I was not proud of. They were warm. They were soft. Every woman who bought one wore it in her own kitchen and nowhere else, and after a while that stopped sitting right with me.

Because a cardigan is the most used thing a woman owns and the least thought about. It goes over everything, it comes on and off six times a day, and almost nobody designs one as though it will be seen.

So the Albertine started as a complaint rather than a design. I wanted a layer that could go over the plain top you already own and make the plain top look chosen. I held out for six things. Two of them the factory argued about and one of them they simply did twice before getting it right.

1Crochet, not knit.

This is the decision everything else follows from. A knit gives you warmth and a flat surface. Crochet gives you a pattern with holes in it, and holes are what stop a cardigan reading as a woolly. The Albertine is rows of small crocheted flowers with open work between them, and the pattern is large enough to see from the other side of a room. It costs more per piece to make than a plain knit and it takes longer. That was the argument.

2It has to work over what is already in the wardrobe.

Anything with a strong colour or a busy print only works over two or three things and then sits in the drawer. So the Albertine is a single flat colour across the whole piece, and the interest comes from the stitch rather than from a pattern fighting whatever is underneath. Put it over a plain white top and it does the work. Put it over a print and it stays out of the way.

3Sleeves that stop on the forearm.

A cardigan sleeve that runs to the wrist gets pushed up and stays pushed up, bunched around the elbow, for the rest of the day. So this one is cut to three quarters and widens slightly to a soft bell, which means it ends where you would have shoved it anyway and it stays there. You can wash up in it without thinking.

4A tie, not buttons.

Buttons on an open cardigan are a small daily annoyance. They pull at the front, they gape between the second and third one, and they leave you with a garment that only looks right done all the way up. The Albertine closes with one narrow tie at the chest and two small tassels. It holds the shape where you want it held, and left undone it still hangs as though you meant it. The first samples came back with buttons. I sent them away.

5Light enough to keep on indoors.

Most of the year the problem is not cold, it is the ten degrees between a warm kitchen and a cool one, or a shop that has the air conditioning on in September. A heavy cardigan solves that once and then has to come off. The open work here means air moves through it, so it takes the edge off without ever becoming the reason you are too warm. It is the layer you can leave on from breakfast until the evening.

6One size, and I will explain why.

I know what one size usually means, and I would be annoyed by it too. Here is the honest reason. This is an open cardigan with no fastening but a tie, so nothing has to meet in the middle and nothing has to be measured to close. It is cut with room in it and it is supposed to fall open. It works from roughly an XS to an XL because on all of those it does the same job. If it had been a fitted piece I would have graded it into eight sizes the way we do with everything else, and I would not have let this one out of the door.

Set against the cardigans already in your drawer

Everybody our age owns four or five. I own more than that. Here is what I think is wrong with most of them, laid out honestly.

	The cardigan in the drawer	The Albertine
The surface	Flat knit, reads as a woolly	Crochet flowers you can see across a room
Where it goes	Round the house	Out, over what you already own
The sleeves	Pushed up and bunched by ten	Cut to the forearm and left alone
The front	Buttons that gape	One tie, holds or hangs open
Indoors	Too warm, so it comes off	Open work, stays on all day

I did not want to sell another cardigan that a woman only ever wore in her own kitchen. That is the entire brief the Albertine was made to.

Why it is £41.95

We buy in small quantities and this year the yarn and the shipping both went up on us, and neither went onto the ticket. The Albertine came in at £110 and it is leaving at £41.95. More than one and it drops again: 15% on two, 20% on three, 25% on four or more.

I would rather be plain than clever about this. There is very little in it for us at that price. We ordered six colours and some of them have moved a great deal faster than others, and a shop our size cannot afford to sit on the ones that did not. When these are gone we are not reordering at this number, because we cannot buy the yarn back at what we paid for it.

Eleven years behind this counter has taught me that a woman who finds one layer that actually works will come back for the next one. That is the bet Alison and I are making by writing to you at £41.95.

This is the first cardigan we have made that I have seen women wear out of the house. That took eleven years and I am not modest about it.

What comes back to us is the same thing over and over: that it does not look like a cardigan. If your own drawer is full of ones you only wear indoors, this is the one I would hand you myself, while the navy and the black are still there.

Emma, for Emma & Alison Winslow · Richmond

See the Albertine at £41.95 →

This is a letter from one of the two sisters who run The Winslow Sisters. Prices and colours shown are correct at the time of writing and change as the run sells through. This page is a paid advertisement for The Winslow Sisters. The Winslow Sisters · Richmond · Free UK delivery · 30-day returns. Your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 are not affected.