The Aran Sweater Is Younger Than Its Legend

In 1932 Muriel Gahan commissioned an adult Aran sweater. Gahan ran The Country Shop in Dublin, which sold Irish crafts on fair-trade terms. The knitting historian Vawn Corrigan dates the adult Aran gansey as we know it to that commission. Within thirty years the same heavy cream knit would be on American television, in Paris couture and in the suitcases of tourists.

It would also arrive wrapped in a story about ancient Celtic stitches and fishermen identified by their jumpers after drowning. That story is the most famous thing about the sweater, and almost none of it holds up.

Three islands in Galway Bay

The sweater is named after the Aran Islands, which sit at the mouth of Galway Bay off the west coast of Ireland. There are three of them, Inis Mór, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr, with a combined population of 1,347 at the 2022 census. They are part of the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking regions, and in Irish the sweater is the Geansaí Árann. The islands are crossed by roughly 1,600 kilometres of dry stone walls.

The knitting is younger than it looks. Most historians place its invention in the 1890s or the early 1900s, when the Congested Districts Board was working to improve the islands' fishing industry. According to Wikipedia's account of the jumper, fishermen and their wives from elsewhere brought the guernsey knitting tradition with them, and island women adapted it. The academic Mary Burke describes the same thing, island knitters reworking the British fisherman's gansey that arrived with the fisheries project.

What the wool does

A traditional Aran is knitted from báinín, undyed cream yarn spun from sheep's wool, sometimes from black sheep. The early sweaters used unwashed wool that kept its natural lanolin, which made the knit water-repellent. That is the practical core of the garment, a dense, oily layer for people who worked on the sea.

The patterns are the part that drew the myths. Patons of England published one of the first commercial Aran patterns in 1940, according to Christina Garton's history in PieceWork magazine. After that, anyone with needles could make one.

The legend, and who wrote it

In 1967 Heinz Edgar Kiewe, who owned a yarn shop, published The Sacred History of Knitting. Kiewe linked Aran stitches to Celtic knotwork and assumed the knitting was ancient. He gave the stitches meanings. Moss stitch stood for abundant growth, the honeycomb for plenty, basket and lattice stitches for old wicker patterns, and the ladder and tree of life for the stages of a life. The book became the main source of everything people repeat about the sweater.

The darker myth says each island family had its own pattern, so a drowned fisherman could be identified by his sweater. Wikipedia points to J. M. Synge's 1904 play Riders to the Sea as a possible source. Synge spent his summers on the islands from 1898 and published The Aran Islands in 1907, so he knew them well. But in the play the body is identified by its socks, and by counting the stitches, not by any family pattern. The knitting historians Richard Rutt, Alice Starmore and Corrigan have all taken Kiewe's thesis apart. Rutt's A History of Handknitting, published in 1987, describes the traditional Aran as fairly modern.

Here is how the claims line up against the record, drawn from the sources above. The comparison is Quiet Menace's own.

How it got famous

The fashion world found it first. In 1955 the designer Digby Morton showed Aran-inspired handknits in his autumn collection in London, which caught the attention of Vogue. By 1960 Caroline Mitchell, fashion editor of the Irish Times, was noting the Irish hand-knit look in Paris couture woollens. Mary Burke, writing for RTÉ Brainstorm, notes that Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly were all photographed or filmed in Aran or Aran-style knits.

Then came the music. In the late 1950s the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem began recording in New York and adopted the sweater as their stage costume. In the early 1960s they wore it on The Ed Sullivan Show and in a televised performance for President John F. Kennedy. Wikipedia reports that the Ardfinnan Woollen Mills reproduced a greasy Aran-weight yarn for the market, and that it was reportedly used in the Clancy Brothers' sweaters. In 1966 the RTV Guide linked the sweater's success to the spread of television sets, a sign of how much the small screen did for it. Wikipedia credits the export trade's growth in the 1950s and 1960s partly to P. A. Ó Síocháin, who arranged for an instructor to teach island knitters standard international sizing, and records that he still struggled to fill orders from around the world.

Tourism did the rest. The world's first duty-free shop opened at Shannon Airport in 1947, and American visitors to Ireland rose sharply from the 1950s. In 1963 an RTÉ feature showed a Galway Aran shop supplied by more than 500 home knitters. The boom did not last forever. By the late 1960s synthetics were popular, and a 1973 survey found that some tourists thought Aran sweaters bulky and unfashionable. In July 2020 Taylor Swift wore one for the photographs that accompanied her album Folklore, and a new generation went looking for one.

Buying one now

Look for wool, ideally undyed cream, and for honest labelling about whether it was knitted by hand or by machine. Hand-knitted Arans cost much more. Machine-knitted versions loosen with wear, so Wikipedia's advice is to buy them one size smaller. The fit should be generous but not shapeless, long enough to cover the belt, and the cables should sit flat without puckering.

The Aran belongs with the other working garments that became fashion. Our history of the Breton stripe shirt follows another seafaring knit ashore, and the Barbour wax jacket and the trench coat cover the weatherproofs that go over it. For more, see menswear history, wardrobe essentials and the Quiet Menace style section.

The real story is less romantic than the legend and more impressive. Island women took a borrowed fisherman's sweater, made it their own within a generation, and saw it go round the world.