Stylee Fridays: Coogi Turns Forty

story THE FADER

There’s definitely a knitwear mood hanging in the air at the moment, and it’s not just because it’s cold enough outside to freeze our eyeballs over. Our knitwear kick is actually pretty well documented and goes back a few seasons now, back to when we discovered designers like Brit Louise Goldin, Swede Sandra Buckland and Brit-by-way-of-Athens Ioannis Dimitrousis whose line was featured in last year’s FADER Africa issue. Other designers, like Mark Fast have been popping up thick and, um, fast, making the kind of mind-bogglingly intricate knitted dresses that look like perfectly formed spider webs.

Some healthy speculation about the wardrobe for the Biggie biopic (out today) got us thinking about classic knits of a slightly different kind (there have been style wars waged between FADER staffers on who can track down the flyest Coogi sweater/dress color combinations—new or lightly used—over the past couple of months). Coogi celebrates its 40th anniversary this month and few people on the planet have been able to pull off that signature textured sweater quite the way Christopher Wallace did. We asked the brand to pull up some Coogi campaign and lookbook images from the archives (peep one from the ’80s after the jump) and a lot of the styles, and color combos back then look like they’d be just as fun to wear now. There are also some sweater dresses up for sale on the site that we’re just waiting to be restocked. Aside from combing the internet for our own closets, it’s been interesting to spot the young designers who owe a smidgen of their influence to some of that legacy. New York label Ideeen have a couple of lovely dresses in their collection for spring this year that both give a futuristic nod to the brand, and looking back over Louise Goldin’s first runway collection, there are definitely some pieces that take a sprinkling of Coogi inspiration too. And as far menswear, Danish designer Henrik Vibsov has the finest offering, with a cardigan in his collection this season that we suspect could be a secret homage to the notorious one himself.