A twinset for men? If anybody can make that work, then it’s got to be Pringle of Scotland. This is the company, after all, whose designer Otto Weisz invented the layered cardigan on a complementary-toned sweater look back in the 1930s.
As Weisz’s current-day menswear equivalent, Gaby Day, conceded, it’s never been an especially, or indeed at all, masculine look. Nonetheless, the idea developed as she researched the role Pringle played in defining the aggressively mumsy color combination favored by the U.K. terrace-casual subculture’s sportswear choices in the 1980s. These powdery yellows and baby blue tones—snarlingly ironic challenges to back-then standards for a heterosexual masculine palette—were incorporated by Day into a mercerized lattice-effect knit short-sleeved shirt and under-sweater to “Pringle-ize,” as she put it, the gender heritage of knit.
This him-set (if I may) came together pretty well. So, too, did piped shacket-esque matching tops, with a hint of Gabicci to them, over track pants and an absolutely lovely looking blue flecked-cotton workwear-tracksuit combination. A tank top in smooth-to-the-hand recycled yarn, a sweatshirt hand-embroidered with faux-naif Pringle logos—including an ’80s sport logo rediscovered by Day in the archive—worked slightly less well. The plastic-to-the-feel short shorts with inserted argyle side stripes were strictly lookbook material, but fetching in their way. Day and her colleague across the corridor, design director Fran Stringer, are aligned in their emphasis of brand language—there was an enormous lion, or in-script Pringle logos on plenty of pieces, here, as in Stringer’s recent output. With a Pringle-ization as punchy as this, why not roar a bit?
