The Knit Crop Top represents our foray into something we're very excited about: Beach Knits. This piece is inspired by a photo that we stumbled upon. We fell in love with the style and searched high and low for something like it, but lo and behold, we found nothing...the style was truly lost and forgotten. We spent the past 6 months reproducing the piece from the photo and we couldn't be happier with the result. See how close we got below.
The Knit Crop Top is a homage to a time when swimsuits were made of wool. This is your grandma's beach sweater!
The Inspiration
The History
While conducting our regular Hammies R&D, we learned that the first swim and beach brands of the 20th century started out as knitting mills! The original swimsuits were made of wool and left almost everything up to the imagination. As the pastime of swimming grew in popularity, Catalina (founded in 1907 as Bentz Knitting Mills) and Jantzen (founded in 1916 as Portland Knitting Company) shifted away from knitting sweaters and into knitting swimsuits. The swimsuit went on to push the limits of American fashion and modesty for the next 40 years. If you want to learn more, we recommend Making Waves: Swimsuits and the Undressing of America by Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker. This explains why we see so many people wearing beach sweaters in vintage photos and ads from the 1950-70s.
This item is shipped directly from the maker! This means you may receive your order in multiple shipments (if you are ordering more than one item) and if it is being made-to-order, please be mindful of the designer's individually allocated lead times! We are proudly connecting our customers and the designers we love in a direct way in the hopes that we can support other small businesses in tandem with our own! Items that are shipped directly from the maker incur a shipping fee that is uniquely set by those designers, and we handle all the rest from there!
