What My Father’s Knitwear Taught Me About Longevity

After my father died, I inherited a few of his sweaters. 

This wasn’t planned, or ceremonial. They simply found their way into my wardrobe. They were good sweaters — properly made, a little eccentric, and unapologetically colourful. He wore suits for work, so his knitwear became a kind of downtime rebellion. Away from the uniform, this was where he allowed himself colour and character. Purples, reds, patterns that didn’t ask for approval.

What surprised me wasn’t the emotion of wearing them. I had expected that. What I didn’t expect was how much they remembered for me — the colours, the faint smell of wool, moments of him wearing them, fragments of time spent together. And still, it didn’t feel heavy. Not sentimental, not precious. Just natural. They slipped easily into my life, as though they were doing what they’d always done: being worn.

That, it turns out, is the point.

Long before I ever thought about starting a clothing brand, those sweaters had already set a quiet benchmark — for quality, for longevity, for clothes that didn’t need to explain themselves to justify staying around.

Clothing used to last long enough for this sort of thing to happen. Not as an heirloom in the grand sense, but as a continuation. A garment could belong to one life and then, without fuss, become part of another. It could carry traces without becoming a relic.

We don’t talk much about that anymore. Clothes now are often framed as moments rather than companions. They arrive loudly and leave quietly. The expectation is brief usefulness, followed by disappearance. Nothing here is meant to stay too long, and certainly nothing is meant to remember.

And yet, the clothes we keep — the ones that survive repeated culls of the wardrobe — tend to earn their place slowly. They soften. They adapt. They start to feel familiar in ways that are difficult to explain but immediately noticeable. A sleeve falls just right. A neckline relaxes. You reach for them without thinking.

This isn’t romance. It’s repetition.

Knowing something about where a garment comes from — what it’s made of, how it was constructed, who was involved in bringing it into the world — quietly deepens that relationship. Not because you’ve been instructed to care, but because context encourages care all by itself.

When something feels considered, you tend to treat it with consideration in return.

My father’s sweaters had this quality. They weren’t perfect, but they were confident. They had already lived a life, and seemed perfectly happy to carry on. Wearing them didn’t feel like holding onto the past. It felt more like extending it forward.

This is often mistaken for nostalgia, but it’s something else entirely. Nostalgia freezes things in time. What I’m describing is continuity — the idea that certain objects can move with us, rather than being endlessly replaced.

There’s a difference between owning something and being its custodian. Ownership suggests entitlement. Custodianship suggests responsibility, though not in a heavy way. More in the sense that you look after what you expect to keep.

A garment with a real story — not a manufactured one — gently invites better behaviour. You repair it. You store it properly. You hesitate before discarding it. Not because you’ve been told to, but because it would feel slightly careless not to.

That isn’t virtue. It’s respect.

When I wear one of my father’s sweaters, I’m not making a statement. I’m not performing memory. I’m simply wearing a good piece of clothing that has already proved it knows how to last.

In a world that moves quickly and replaces things easily, that feels quietly reassuring. A reminder that some things are worth making properly, worth keeping around, and worth letting gather a few stories along the way.

They don’t shout about it. They don’t need to.

They just stay.