The knits on the Gran Sasso wall this fall were chosen on a January morning, at a table covered in black swatch boards and sample sweaters, eight months before any of them reached Whyte Avenue. This is what that morning looks like, and why a shop like ours buys the way it does.
What an appointment actually is
A knitwear house like Gran Sasso does not send a catalogue and wait. Twice a year the new range is laid out in a showroom, and the shops that carry it book a morning to work through it. The samples hang on a rail, one of each style in one colour. The colours live on cards: black boards with a swatch of the actual knit for every shade the style is offered in, each with its three-digit code underneath. There is an iPad with the order sheet open, and there are sheets of small green dots that go on the card as the choices are made.
That is the whole apparatus. A rail, a stack of cards, a tablet, and a few hours. What happens in those hours decides what you find on our floor in October.
The order sheet, mid-morning: one zip jacket, six colours chosen out of the full card.
Two dozen colours, and we take two
This is the part that surprises people. A single crewneck can be offered in two dozen colours. The card for one of this season's crews ran to four pages of knitted sweater silhouettes, six to a page: ecru, oatmeal, two taupes, camel, a chocolate, a plum, five blues from sky to midnight, three greys, a bottle green, a mustard, a coral, a rust, a cherry and a burgundy. All of them lovely. All of them available. We took two.
Two of the four pages for one crewneck. The sweater is identical on every page. Only the colour moves.
Choosing is not a matter of taste alone, or at least not ours. We are buying for a particular man in a particular city. He owns navy trousers, grey flannels, a pair of brown cords and some denim, and he wants a knit that works with all of them, in a winter that runs from October to April. So the first colours onto the order are the ones that disappear into a wardrobe: navy, charcoal, a mid grey, oat, chocolate, olive. Then one colour with some nerve, because a floor of navy and grey is a dull floor and because there is always one man who wants the mustard.
The second question is what sits beside it. A colour that is beautiful on the card can be wrong on the shelf if three other houses have already given us the same shade in the same weight. We carry Harley of Scotland, Patrick Assaraf and Merz b. Schwanen in knits, and a Gran Sasso crew earns its place by being something none of them do: a finer gauge, a different fibre, a shade the others do not run. The point of a small shop is that the wall has been edited. Forty blue sweaters is not an edit.
Plenty of good shops carry Gran Sasso, and that is as it should be for a house this good. What makes ours ours is not the label on the neck. It is the particular colours and stitches that came off that table for this city, and most of them you will not see side by side anywhere else.
The stitch is the real decision
Colour is what the card shows. Stitch is what the hand finds. Before anything goes on the sheet, the sample comes off the rail and gets turned inside out, stretched at the cuff, held up to the window. A knit is yarn plus a structure, and the structure decides how the thing behaves for the next ten years.
Donegal flecks and a twisted marl rib. The same wool, two different characters, decided at the spinning stage.
Gauge. The number of stitches to the inch. A fine twelve-gauge merino crew slides under a sport coat and reads almost like a shirt. An eight-gauge turtleneck in a two-ply yarn has weight and memory, and its collar stands up on its own at the end of the day. Both are merino. They are not the same sweater, and they are not for the same man.
Ply and spin. Two ends of yarn plied together make a denser, warmer knit that holds its shape at the elbow and the cuff. Worsted-spun merino is combed before spinning and gives a smooth, polished surface that wears cleanly under a jacket. Woollen-spun yarn keeps more air in it and comes out softer and loftier, with a more rustic hand. The donegal and salt-and-pepper knits start further back still, with flecks of a second colour blended in before the yarn is spun, so the colour lives inside the fibre rather than sitting on top of it.
Texture. A waffle stitch traps air and has some spring in it, which is why it suits a polo collar or a quarter-zip you will pull on and off all day. A cable is heavier and slower to knit, and it is the right call on a cardigan that will be worn as a jacket. A fine vertical rib gives a knit polo body without bulk. The sample tells you all of this in thirty seconds, if you handle it.
Waffle on the polo, cable on the cardigan. The stitch is chosen for the job the garment will do.
Soft, or strong, and sometimes both
Every knit buy is a negotiation between how a thing feels on the first day and how it looks on the hundredth. Pure cashmere is the softest fibre on the table and the least forgiving of a hard winter: it pills under a coat sleeve and loses its shape at the cuff. A worsted extrafine merino is a little crisper in the hand and holds its line for years. The blends sit in between. One of this season's mock-necks is wool, cashmere and a touch of viscose, in which the wool gives it structure, the cashmere softens the hand, and the viscose keeps the drape clean so it does not fuzz.
So we ask, for each piece: who is wearing this, and how? A turtleneck that goes under a jacket three days a week needs the two-ply weight. A crew worn over a shirt on a Saturday can afford to be finer and softer. We would rather sell you a sweater that still looks right in year four than one that flatters in the fitting room and disappoints by February. That is not a slogan. It is which column the unit goes in.
Contrast at the zip. Small details like a suede placket, horn buttons or a corozo zip pull are the things we look for on the sample, not the card.
Then the units
Once a style and its colours are settled, the order becomes arithmetic. Gran Sasso cuts Italian sizing, 46 through 58 on the label, which we list as 36 through 48 on the site, and every size of every colour is a decision. A core colour in a core style is bought in depth, across the full run, because it will sell steadily from October to March and we do not want to tell a man in a 44 that his size went in November. A colour with nerve is bought shallow, in the three sizes most of our customers wear, because it is there to make the wall interesting, not to carry the season.
Get the units wrong and the mistake lives on the floor for months. Buy the mustard in depth and it is still there in March. Buy the navy shallow and it is gone by Remembrance Day. Most of what we know about that we learned by doing it wrong at some point, and the till tells us, honestly, every season.
A 54 is a 44
One more thing that makes Gran Sasso easy to buy, for us and for you. The house sizes consistently. Their blocks have been cut the same way since the Di Stefano brothers set up their first machines in 1952, so a man who takes one size in a Gran Sasso crew takes the same size in the turtleneck, the cardigan and the waistcoat. If a particular style is cut differently, a touch boxier or longer in the body, we say so in the product's name and in its description, so you are never guessing from the photograph.
The label inside is Italian, 46 through 58. We list every piece in the North American chest size you already know, so the knit the label calls a 54 is a 44 on our site, and you order the number you order in everything else. The Gran Sasso size guide carries the conversion and the measured charts, and every product page shows the size scale, so you can confirm exactly what you are getting before you buy.
Then we confirm it again. Before a Gran Sasso order ships, we check the size against what we know of you, and if something looks off we ask. Last week a customer ordered the wrong size by mistake; we caught it, exchanged it for the right one and got it out to him on time. People make mistakes. Catching them is part of the job. If you are between two numbers, tell us your chest and what you plan to wear under it and we will pick the size with you.