The Wool Diaries

Three weeks in Trøndelag, following one fleece from shearing shed to scouring house to spinning mill. The farmer, Astrid, keeps a flock of two hundred old Norwegian spælsau — a breed that predates the Viking ports and grows a double coat no mill has ever successfully imitated.

What struck me most was the vocabulary. Astrid describes wool by weather: how the fleece behaved in a wet June, how it felt after the first frost. Our industry describes wool by micron count. Both are true; only one remembers that the material was once alive and outside.

The FW27 outerwear program will be spun entirely from that flock. It is more expensive than any wool we have used, and there is not enough of it. Both facts feel like corrections.