Pringle's Day of Record

A feature article in today's Telegraph reports on the Day of Record event that Pringle held in Hawick in August last year.  Following on from the event a 12-piece archive collection was created by the MA students at Central Saint Martins in conjunction with the specialised knitwear craftspeople in Hawick.

The project was designed to:

Flesh out Pringle's practically non-existent archive and create a collection off the back of its findings. 'When I first arrived at the company and visited the factory, I asked about the archive and people laughed,' explains Benoit Duverger, Pringle's managing director, who started at the company a year after the brand ceased manufacturing in Hawick in 2008. 'I was shown a room with a couple of boxes stuffed with jumpers. That was all that was left after a flood in 2005 swept everything away. Hopefully today will give us back what the flood took.'

'We nearly did get to a point where we forgot who we were, what we'd achieved and our innovations,' Duverger says. 'Rediscovering our archive will put us in touch with our history. It is fantastic meeting people who had first-hand working knowledge of designing or working in our factories. They're able to explain techniques we haven't used for decades so that we can bring them back.'

Read more about it here on the official website.  Other articles about this project have appeared in Vogue (July 2010) and on the Central Saint Martins' blog (May 2011).  There is also an interview with Prof Louise Wilson here.