Fashion: The extraordinary lightness of knitwear

As Joan Murray herself says, people don’t come to her with a commission for a piece of bespoke knitwear because they want the predictable or ordinary.

No, what they’re after is a garment that behaves as though it’s in tune with the wearer’s body, a living piece of art that is arresting in some way (without shouting about itself), but nonetheless practical.

Whether European princesses or students who’ve saved for months for a piece, Joan’s clients seek a touch of drama, a swirl of fullness in a multi-coloured fan-tailed skirt, shimmying back and forth and revealing geometric rays of finely worked wool and silk as the legs move.

In a small studio in Skipton, she conceives and crafts with her knitting machines clothes that are stylish, intriguing and based on geometric shapes. They flatter the body by working with and enhancing the curves and planes. The human form is not so much dressed as carefully and beautifully wrapped in fine yarns that allow maximum movement.

Joan, who still speaks in the warm lilt of her native Northern Ireland, plays with colour combinations – sometimes arriving at startling juxtapositions by juggling rainbow stacks of yarns, and consulting a mood book of ideas from her travels.

A relatively recently conceived passion for dancing tango with her artist husband Chris has worked itself into her collections, with sinuous flicks and swirls of fabric suggestive of the twists and turns of the female dancer around the male. Where the body goes the fabric follows, light as a feather and adding a flourish to every step.

Originally trained in weaving, Joan moved on from Winchester College of Art to the Royal College of Art in London. At one stage she turned down a job in Zandra Rhodes’s design studio, preferring to plough her own furrow and move north.