Later this summer, in time for the Fringe Festival, this brand will be opening a pop-up on Edinburgh’s George Street. It seems crazy that Pringle of Scotland has no standalone retail in Scotland’s capital, a city perpetually flooded by tourists often caught short by the bracingly changeable climate. According to Fran Stringer, their wholesale partners in the ’Burgh sell classic Pringle sweaters and scarves by the bucketload, so the addition of this new store should make those figures overfloweth.
Stringer’s job is to perpetuate and cultivate that market for the classic expression of Pringle while broadening its parameters, and ideally its audience, via these collections. As ever, she looks to the former to fuel the latter. Here, again, the argyle pattern was the decorative focus. To modernize it Stringer subtracted the “rakers”—an argyle-phile’s term for the horizontal lines in the pattern—or sometimes distorted by elongation of the diamond grid, or again sometimes zoomed in to create vaguely jockey-ish colors on diagonal split sweaters. The chunky-looking sweaters in oversize cable pattern were air-spun to give the appearance of substance with the seasonal attractions of weightlessness. There was a neo-bobby soxer feel to some of Stringer’s roomily armholed, close-to-cropped shapes in her modernized argyle, which—despite being a pleasing pattern—was effectively zhooshed with the addition of an Escher-esque intarsia floral in 70/30 cashmere/lambswool sweaters and kimono cardigans.
That other great Pringle trope, the twinset, was reset in—you guessed it—an argyle, this one expressed via texture in the absence of rib knit. Complementary pieces to the knit main event included attractively cut denim, pleated skirts, and a cool detail-stripped trench. The fringed gray or teal knits seemed especially perfect for Edinburgh, but everything here was fit for walking the Royal Mile in just-different-enough Pringle of Scotland style.
