Fashion is obsessed with the latest trends and seems to be on a constant quest for what's fresh and new, so it was only natural Scottish cashmere yarn manufacturer Todd & Duncan to ponder a bit about the meaning of the word "new" while working on its S/S 2020 collection.
The company, well-known for its interest in developing colours often borrowed from art movements or contemporary artists, decided to interpret the theme of the "new" working on innovative shades for its cashmere yarns and eventually came up with two colour groups.
The first, entitled "Summer Melanges", is inspired by natural plant dyes found in the Scottish countryside such as woodland and hedgerow, and features 6 new soft melange and versatile colours; the second includes 15 new solid colours with a cluster of these inspired by trout flies fished on Lochleven.
There is also a visual inspiration for this collection that comes from graphic design and in particular from the cover of Penguin Classics. This inspiration is particularly intriguing as the manufacturer kept in mind the possibility of creating with its yarns knitted patterns with a geometrical edge about them, like motifs of circles, triangles, squares and rectangles.
Yet the company didn't just choose books for their recognisable font styles that could be easily applied to jacquards and intarsia motifs, but also looked at their content. Among the inspiring volumes there are indeed Nationalism by Rabindranath Tagore, a volume in which the author called for a resurgence of the East, pondering on the challenge it posed to Western supremacy, and proposed a future beyond nationalism, based on cooperation and racial tolerance, and The Anatomy of Judgement by M. L. J. Abercrombie, in which the author describes her research teaching students how to think scientifically and objectively, helping them to develop their observational skills in order be better able to obtain accurate information from specific situations.
Some of the themes tackled in these volumes, such as the juxtaposition between the East and the West in Nationalism, are symbolised by some of the bi-coloured yarns in Todd & Duncan's summer marl palette that features three colour stories ("The Contrasts", "The Brights" and "The Tonals"). Todd & Duncan's S/S 20 yarns were presented during the international yarn fair Pitti Filati 84 that opened today in Florence, Italy (on until 25th January).
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