A stone villa and its cypresses along a ridge at sunset, a ploughed field falling away below it and olive trees in shadow across the foreground

Bespoke

The house knits three sweaters, in two yarns and four colours. This is the door for what falls outside them.

A pale crew neck worn in an autumn field, the neck band and the cuff close in the light

What bespoke means here

It means the house will work outside its own range, and it means nothing beyond that. Frassino knits three sweaters in two yarns and four colours, and the smallness is the argument: a short range knitted a thousand times is knitted better than a long one knitted once each. Bespoke is the door for the man the range does not fit. It is not a second range standing quietly behind the first, and it is not a way to have anything you like as long as you pay for it.

Three things come through that door and they are the three below, in the order of how far each one takes the house from what it already does well.

A fountain pen resting on a page of handwriting in Italian

And the house may say no

That is written here rather than discovered later, because a piece it cannot knit well is a piece it does not knit.

Everything else is agreed before a stitch is cast on: what it is, what it costs, and the month it arrives, in a letter you can hold the house to.

The three pieces laid over one another, the tipping showing at each collar

Your own measurements

The pieces are knitted in five sizes, S to XXL, and the finished measurements of every size are published beside them. Most men are one of the five and the house would rather sell them one of the five, for the reason above: a size cut a thousand times is a size that has had its mistakes taken out of it.

Where none of the five is right, the house will knit to your own figures. It is a different job and worth knowing why. The panels are shaped to measurements rather than to a size, there is no sample from a previous run to check the first one against, and the piece is knitted once rather than down a run, so the first of anything is the one that carries the risk.

The four numbers

What the house asks for is four numbers, taken from a knit you already own and wear: the chest, the length, the shoulder and the sleeve, measured with the garment laid flat and not stretched. That is a far more reliable instruction than a tape around a living man, because it is taken from something that already fits you.

The figures are kept, so the second piece is a sentence rather than a conversation.

A colour of your own

A colour of your own is a dye lot of your own, and that single fact is the whole of the difficulty. The house dyes one lot per colour per run, so that the collar, the body and the cuffs of a piece all come out of the same bath; it is the only way the seams do not show as faint bars under a window or a lamp.

A fifth colour cannot be lifted out of a run that has already been dyed, and it cannot be added to one that has been cast on. It is a run of its own, with the minimum a run of its own carries, which is why the house asks what you have in mind before it says what it would cost.

Bring a colour, in a yarn or a garment or a photograph taken in daylight, and it will be put to the spinner and matched against what the mill can actually dye. You will be told which of the two things it is: a shade the mill already holds, or a shade it would have to make. They are not the same answer and they are not the same number.

A cone of fine yarn in natural beige standing on a white table, the fibre with a halo on it in daylight

White cones turning on a winding machine in a mill

A cone of fine natural yarn standing on a mill floor, more cones behind it in the dark

A cone of the same fine yarn in a dyed heather, a loose end running down across the white table

A hand at the needle bed of a knitting machine, the piece still on the machine

Something the house does not make

A cardigan. A vest. A piece in vicuna, the finest fibre there is, which the house works to order. A longer body, a shorter sleeve. A piece you have worn for twenty years and cannot replace because the house that made it has gone.

Write and say what it is as plainly as you can, and say what it is for, because the second half tells the house more than the first. You will get one of three answers, personally and in writing: that it can be knitted, that it can be knitted with a change the house will name and explain, or that it cannot. The third answer is a real answer and it is given often.

Nothing is agreed, priced or knitted until it has been put to you in writing first, and the house would rather lose the order than put its number inside something it would not want found in twenty years.

How to ask

Write to the house with the piece, the colour and the size you have in mind. It answers personally.

Write to the house

Elsewhere in the house

A wooden clothes brush resting in a crate

Le Forme

A knitted piece folded on a plank in afternoon light

Care & Repair