In a time when fashion struggles with its ecological impact and the need for meaningful workmanship, knitwear has become a borderland of extreme reimagining. In studios from Brooklyn to Berlin, a new crop of designers is unpicking the rules of yarn and needle, making knitwear a vehicle for sustainability, technicality, and cultural narrative.
Freya McKee, Aisling Camps, Janette Oh, Rui Zhou, Lou de Bètoly, and Paolina Russo, these designers are not just designing clothes—they’re designing wearables that disrupt mass production, adore faults, and redefine the bodice-fabric relationship. From zero-waste models to 3D-knit technologies, their designs fuse traditional methods with sci-fi visions, demonstrating that every thread can be imbued with the responsibility of legacy and revolution. Diversity of thought drives this imaginative renaissance.
Others promote slow fashion with made-to-order creations, while others reinterpret cultural intensity in light, airy knits. Technical revolutionaries recycle textile waste into performance-focused sportswear, and avant-garde designers reinterpret knitwear as second skins of intimacy that celebrate radical self-acceptance. Meanwhile, other surrealist crochet sculptures redefine the limits of wearable art, and nostalgic allusions get sewn into holographic, youth-rebellion. Together, they represent a worldwide tapestry of innovation—where sustainability is not a trend but a technical necessity and where each loop of yarn tells a story of past, present, and potential.
1. Freya McKee
From London, Freya McKee is a pioneer in sustainable knitwear, combining careful craftsmanship with an unshakeable commitment to ethical fashion. Her brand functions on a made-to-order basis, with zero yarn waste through fully fashioned methods that build garments stitch by stitch. Apart from her main collection, McKee’s “one of one” range gives new life to offcut material, reworking secondhand yarns into handcrafted, heirloom-quality pieces that cannot be replicated through mass production. Every piece—a chunky cable-knit sweater or a daintily ribbed scarf—is a representation of her ethos of slow, deliberate creation.
Her work has found a cult following, available directly online through her website and in carefully selected collections at Marc Jacobs’ cutting-edge Heaven store in Los Angeles, where her environmentalist ethos perfectly complements the boutique’s cutting-edge aesthetic.
2. Aisling Camps
Aisling Camps brings a warm, sun-kissed sensibility to Brooklyn’s indie fashion scene influenced by her Trinidadian heritage. Her hand-knit collections, made from luxurious Italian yarns, redefine knitwear for warm weather, with airy mesh cardigans, see-through bikini tops, and openwork crop sets that blur the boundary between beachwear and streetwear.
Camps’ designs—frequently sprinkled with whimsical fringe and discreet, body-aware draping—capture the uninhibited spirit of Caribbean carnivals, while her collaborations with brands such as Pyer Moss showcase her ability to blend artisanal detail with modern edge. By focusing on small-batch manufacture and haptic craftsmanship, Camps advocates for a future of knitwear that’s sensual and sustainable, encouraging wearers to wrap themselves in warmth without burden.
3. Janette Oh
Janette Oh is a Brooklyn-based knitwear designer and visual artist whose work transforms textiles into sculptural, emotion-driven narratives through sustainable material innovation. Her practice merges technical knit construction—such as fully-fashioned knitting, engineered jacquards, and tension-mapped performance designs for Nike—with meticulous hand-finishing processes that rework deadstock yarns and textile scraps. These materials, imbued with memory, become structured clothing or tactile objects exploring identity and care.
Oh’s professional background includes knitwear and textile development for Michael Kors, Proenza Schouler, and 3.1 Phillip Lim, though her independent work now prioritizes conceptual depth over trend cycles. She integrates industrial methods with slow craft—hand knitting, weaving, and experimental embroidery—to create pieces that oscillate between fragility and precision, evoking emotional states like grief or endurance.
Her multidisciplinary projects include Site 003: Grass Stain (showcasing sustainable knitwear as material dialogue), Site: Living Room Hours (designing a pop-up library’s tactile-digital visual identity), and Liquid Arrangement: Provider (costume design translating bodily autonomy into wearable expressions at Wave Hill). Across mediums, Oh’s work invites audiences to engage with the unseen labor of handwork, layered material stories, and garments as alive with emotional resonance.
4. Rui Zhou
Rui Zhou’s New York fashion label has been equated with radical self-acceptance and vulnerability, redefining knitwear as a second skin. Since she opened in 2019, Zhou’s dreamy, deconstructed designs—favored by Solange, Rina Sawayama, and Teyana Taylor—push against traditional beauty norms by honoring “flaws” via strategic cut-outs and asymmetrical draping. Her go-to bodysuits hug the body like liquid, topped with hand-knit panels framing unconventional points of focus: the curve of a collarbone, the curve where hip meets thigh, or the ripple of a spine. By leaving edges open and seams undone, Zhou reifies imperfection as a vocabulary of intimacy, creating clothing that is at once intensely personal yet universally relatable.
Her garments, carried by high-concept boutiques all over the world, encourage their wearers to love their bodies as constantly shifting masterpieces of art.
5. Lou de Bètoly
Maximalist couturier and Berlin resident Lou de Bètoly employs crochet as alchemy. Taking inspiration from surrealist painting, Baroque opulence, and her childhood memories of growing up in France, her ranges swing between hush-hush cashmere cocoons and outrageous, sculptural pieces that hang in mid-air. For her most recent line, de Bètoly reused old fabric to create kaleidoscopic patchwork coats and fringed skirts that appear to flow into abstract shapes. A prodigy who started learning crochet at the age of five, she treats every stitch with a jeweler’s care, whether designing dainty lace gloves or experimental headpieces covered in flowing yarn tentacles.
Admired by avant-garde thinkers such as Lava La Rue and model Jazzelle, de Bètoly’s designs are a testament to the infinite potential of knitwear—where disorder and control meet in wearable poetry.
6. Paolina Russo
Paolina Russo’s London-based label is a riotous ode to suburban nostalgia, reinterpreting ’90s youth culture through a lens of avant-garde experimentation. Co-designed with Lucile Guilmard since 2022, the brand fuses Russo’s craft-driven roots (think DIY friendship bracelets and hockey jerseys) with Guilmard’s sharp, sculptural tailoring. Their collaborative work thrives on contrasts: upcycled materials clash in neon-bright palettes, while “illusion knits” create hypnotic, holographic effects that warp perception. Recent collections venture into technical innovations such as 3D-knit padding and spliced sportswear silhouettes, all underpinned by a focus on sustainability. Russo’s creations—worn by Gen Z icons and appearing in trendy editorial spreads—turn childhood memories into subversive, wearable art, demonstrating that knitwear can be both rebellion and reckoning with the past.
With the fashion world grappling with its place in a changing world, the designs of these trailblazers, Freya McKee, Aisling Camps, Janette Oh, Rui Zhou, Lou de Bètoly, and Paolina Russo, prove knitwear’s redemptive strength. No longer beholden to convention, the craft has turned into a vibrant force—blending ethics with art, engineering with poetry, and heritage with horizon-expanding experimentation. Each designer’s ethos, while different, adds to a shared rethinking of what it means to be textile: not just material, but medium; not just fashion, but discourse.
Their methods push us to reconsider the lifecycle of each thread, calling for a move away from disposability and towards reverence. In honoring imperfection, welcoming waste as a creative force, and dissolving the boundaries between garment and art, they create a new vocabulary for fashion—one in which sustainability is not divorced from innovation, and in which each stitch has the power to spark change. As these visionaries continue to unravel and reweave the fabric of their art, they invite us all to think not only about what we wear, but how we wear it: with intention, curiosity, and a greater sense of connection to the hands and stories that fashion our world.
