Don’t ask me how these things happen they just do and over the last three years I have grown to accept them.
But by some mere gossamer thread over the internet a Russian designer who works with knitted garments and sometimes alpaca has produced some stunning designs. I can’t speak to how marketable they will be in North America or even what they might cost but….well you be the judge here are four examples of his work.

Barbarian Knitwear

Who is Alexander Serafimov?
He graduated from the polytechnic in engineering and had several responsible but not particularly creative jobs. However, he had very wide interests including art, literature, ancient history, entomology and karate. He began designing clothing entirely by accident.

One day, his wife was preparing to knit herself a new dress. She was looking at a German knitting magazine called Verena. Alexander looked at the illustrations and suddenly realized that all of the images were familiar to him, "I had been turning over the pages of a huge book dedicated to the history of photography all over the world. One picture among others was one of the first color photos, showing an Alps resort around 1912.

There were so many happy, rosy-faced skiers (of both sexes), standing under snowy spruces, dressed in sweaters much like those I saw at Verena's pages. Men were decorated with manly crosses, rhomboid shapes, snow-flakes, with reindeers galloping from right shoulder to left. Women shamelessly tried to tempt men with flowers (of species unknown even to inveterate botanists), satin-stitched on their shoulders and breasts."

He realized that while everything else has evolved the world of knitwear design was very conservative. He describes being "literally seized" with the aspiration of fighting against this conservatism.

His philosophy of design is to give a "wee bit of a shock" but he does not consider himself particularly avant-garde. His engineering background helped him to design a novel fastener which you can see integrated into his designs.

Click here to take the Mulberry Alpacas survey.
Adrian Stewart - click here to go to Mulberry Alpacas.
Click here to register for the Mulberry Alpacas Newsletter.
Click here to find out about National Alpaca Farm Day 2007.