outdoor sweaters

Warm, elegant and soft, this bouclé cardigan with its wide lapels is ideal for cold weather days. Women from Orkocraft Artisan Association knit the open sweater on manual knitting machines with a blend of baby alpaca, the fleece of the season's first shearing.

Warm, elegant and soft, this bouclé cardigan with its wide lapels is ideal for cold weather days. Women from Orkocraft Artisan Association knit the open sweater on manual knitting machines with a blend of baby alpaca, the fleece of the season's first shearing.

Fernando Cano designs a stylized version of the Andean cross, known as a chakana, for this handsome gray cardigan. Detailed in beige, the chakana represents the link between this world and the world above. Featuring cedar wood buttons and lapel v-neck, the jersey stitch cardigan is knit of alpaca, a warm, lightweight and soft fleece worn in the Andes since the days of the Inca Empire.

In just a century since they first appeared, the textured wool sweaters of the Aran Islands have become “as tenacious an international symbol of Ireland as the harp and shamrock,” writes fashion historian Deirdre McQuillan. It wasn’t until the home crafts movement in the early 1900s that Aran’s distinctive patterns became known around the world. Today, from tourist shops to fashion shows, one can find sweaters based on stitches that were invented by grandmothers and great-grandmothers only a few generations ago.