Unstitching the Single Most JJJJound Garment (EXCLUSIVE)
The quintessential material representation of JJJJound, Montreal's paragon of aesthetic refinement, is the grey sweater. Nothing could appear more unassumingly quotidian. Nothing could be more impossible to perfect.
To plunge the minutiae of JJJJound's grey sweaters is unlock the factor that makes JJJJound utterly essential.
The design studio's tasteful social media presence and knowingly classic clothes are the product of scalpel-sharp sensibilities that pare back extraneity until only the essential remains. This is JJJJound's take on design by subtraction, resulting in what the late Virgil Abloh adroitly termed "the epitome."
JJJJound has since matured from moodboard to a clothing line reflecting its clarity of taste and tone, with wares demarcated into no-nonsense categories like "basics," "leisure," and "sportwear."
But don't be undersold by their modest demarcations: Clothes this classic leave no room for misstep. They live and die by their fit, their fabric, their feel. And none more than what's arguably JJJJound's signature garment.
“When we first started, we weren’t trying to recreate anything specific. We just wanted to make our own grey fleece," said JJJJound founder Justin R. Saunders. "I remember rolling out our first batch of fabric, threading different yarns with Mehdi [Bouchami, Design Director] to see how they played together. It was never about chasing the right tone, it was about building one from scratch to understand it better."
JJJJound's endless quest to temper the grey sweater is, really, JJJJound's aim to perfect arguably the most perfect piece of clothing. Except that there is no finish line.
"There’s no such thing as the perfect grey mélange, they’re all as good as one another," Saunders said. "Each one just says something slightly different.”
It almost always comes back to pullovers in grey mélange, a speckled texture created from warp and weft threads of varying weights and shade. Mixing these disparate fibers, playing with organic and inorganic materials, shifting the pattern, washing or treating the textiles, stitching hems of varying thicknesses — a staggering amount of variables are necessary to nail for a single quality result.
Since 2017, JJJJound has introduced and tweaked a handful of sweater styles over a half-dozen times. And though they come in other colors, none is more JJJJound than grey.
The J70, JJJJound's first sweater, repped a tight neck and raglan sleeve with a gentle contrast stitch true to its 1970s inspiration; it eventually returned in a narrower, heavyweight formulation with comparatively narrow ribs.
The J90, the '90s-flavored crux of JJJJound's sweater series, debuted in 2018 and for each subsequent release, its ribbing, torso, collar, cut, design, and textile was reappraised. It's now available in a brushed-back Portuguese fleece that weighs a precise 307 gram per square meter.
Nothing escapes JJJJound's consideration. The 98-percent cotton, two-percent polyester body of the J95 sweater released in 2019, for instance, was chosen both for its beefy 14oz. heft — rare is it that hoodies are weightier than 12oz. — and the particularity of its blend, which afforded the feel of cotton and the durability of poly.
What JJJJound considers its "most assured" sweater, the fairly new J2000, is fitted with metal aglets, dropped shoulders, and typically understated off-white stitching and sleeve branding in a loosened '00s-inspired fit.
Most importantly, it wears a fresh form of grey, sitting somewhere between its forebears in the ever-expanding lineage of JJJJound's idealized monochromatic sweaters.
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