So I got two Missoni sweaters at Target and I LOVE THEM. Here they are:
Jealous?
Here’s the best thing about them. Those shiny red tags, which I kept for reasons that are opaque even to me.
So, now when I say I love them, I mean it. But they’re not perfect by a stretch. A real Missoni would differ. For instance, we can just talk about the interior finishing.
This is called overlock and my guess is that there's not one machine that does this in Missoni's factories.
The seams on the short sweater are overlocked. The alternatives to overlock on a sweater constructed like this one are rare and expensive. Just like a Missoni. I’d love to show them to you, but I don’t have a Missoni sweater handy.
If you want to check on how a garment is made, look at the place inside, where the armhole and sideseam meet.
Above, you can see also that there are threads all over. Also, do you see that yellow thread going all the way down the sideseam? Well, it’s there because when the stripe is knit, that yarn needs to be picked up again to make another stripe. Cutting and knotting and trimming those babies costs a fortune because someone has to do it. And even though you think little girls in China are being paid four cents a month to do it, the amount of labor that would go into doing that would be egregious.
So, when you want to see if something should be more expensive than it is, turn it inside out.
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