The Christmas Jumper. Who Started It?
Christmas jumpers – not so much a fashion statement as a naff novelty item. It’s next to impossible to go out at this time of year without being subjected to some particularly tasteless examples of knitwear, all of which, without exception, look like pages from Ceefax circa Christmas 1980...
... so where exactly did the ‘Christmas Jumper’ get started?
For a time, I thought I’d invented it myself. Back in the mid 80s, I began to notice sweaters in red and green motifs being sold around this time of year. Thinking the colour scheme looked festive, I bought a couple of examples. These were absolutely not being sold as ‘Christmas Jumpers’ – the term didn’t even exist – and they definitely did not feature Christmassy motifs such as holly, fir trees, redindeer and suchlike. They just struck me as looking ‘a bit Christmassy’.
I had, of course, been sold the idea by the retailers involved – stores like Top Man and the recently arrived Next – and compared to what would come later, those early sweaters were models of discretion, even if they did commit the cardinal fashionista’s sin of combining red and green in a single design. Nevertheless, you didn’t see many people wearing them – the big spike in sales of festive knitwear wouldn’t happen until much later.
These seasonal sweaters were, I think, a development of a trend for ‘cool’ knitwear that had emerged in the early 80s. Jumpers in certain colour schemes and featuring certain motifs – skiiing and snowflakes were popular – had become must-have fashion items around 1983. The most desirable colour scheme was burgundy and grey, but yellow and grey was also popular. You saw them on pop stars of the era, particularly those wishing to cultivate a ‘cosy’ or ‘cuddly’ image like Haircut One Hundred. Paul Young’s debut album shamelessly used the burgundy and grey motif for its cover design. This was definitely a ‘thing’, to use an expression we didn’t have back then.
So when those Christmassy colours were added to the mix – I’d put it around 1984 – it was simply fashion retail running with an established trend and trying to put a subtle, festive spin on it. There was no sudden explosion in Christmassy knitwear, just a slow ‘drip-drip’ of seasonal colours that began appearing on the rails in this era.
I wondered what the internet had to say on the subject and found a number of worthless and specious articles (one of them in a national newspaper which should know better) that were badly researched (not researched at all, in fact) and used the subject as an excuse for some sarcastic observational humour. Wikipedia offers us something a bit better, but a lot of the ‘facts’ in its own article on Christmas Jumpers are based on hearsay and supposition. Val Doonican and Andy Williams get namechecked: both of them were known for their taste in knitwear of a certain stripe, and both presented many a Christmas TV special over the years. So were they responsible for giving birth to the Chistmas Jumper as a cultural phenomenon?
Absolutely not. I can find only one image online of Andy Williams wearing a ‘Christmas Jumper’ and he’s an old man – definitely not a picture from the 1980s or 90s. And while Val Doonican can be found wearing many a patterned cardigan, there are no examples that can be singled out as having the DNA of the Christmas Jumper. Did people follow their example and rush out to buy festive knitwear? No. I’m not saying that they didn’t help to sell a lot of cardigans and sweaters to a certain demographic, but we have to look elsewhere to find the initiators of the Christmas Jumper in its modern incarnation: assuming we can find them at all.
Googling ‘Christmas Jumper 1960s’ and even 1970s brings up only contemporary images, so I think we can rule out both decades as having had any influence on the trend. Knitwear has always been popular as a gift for Christmas, but if you don’t get your festive sweater until Christmas Day itself, you’ve already missed out on half the party season. The Christmas Jumper as a phenomenon begins in the pre-Christmas round of works dos and drinks parties, which is when these hideous garments are brought out of mothballs every year.
Wikipedia’s article on the subject namechecks TV presenters Gyles Brandreth and Timmy Mallett as having popularised the idea of the Christmas Jumper, ‘during the 1980s’ without citing specific examples, which strikes me as being a bit vague. Another article I found online mentions the knitwear being worn by characters in situation comedies of the 1980s, again without naming a single instance. It also refers to the city of Vancouver’s claim to have been the birthplace of the ‘ugly Christmas sweater’, where a themed party has been held at the Commodore Ballroom since – er – 2002. Bah, humbug! This won’t do at all!
Back to Wikipedia, where, again without any evidence to back up the claim, their article states that Christmas Jumpers are ‘often seen as a hand-made present knitted by an elderly relative’ which is not only a ludicrous generalisation but is bordering on ageism. They go on to inform us that the Christmas sweater was ‘seen as a gag gift’ during the 1990s and 2000s. But by whom? This is one of those Wiki articles that seriously needs taking to task. I need to see a magazine article from the era before I’ll accept anything as wooly as this (you see what I did there?) Typically, Wikipedia is poor on statistics on any subject that pre-dates its own emergence as an informational touchstone (15 January 2001, if you must know), and their article reaches firmer ground when it gets to the present century. The most interesting statistic on offer is the observation that Amazon reported a 600% increase in sales of Christmas Jumpers in 2011. So what happened in 2011 to account for this remarkable spike? Did it just occur at random or was there a kind of pop cultural ‘blue touchpaper’ involved? I don’t have time to do the kind of deep delve research this requires, and it may well turn up nothing in any case. So we’ll simply have to accept that, for whatever reason, there was an outbreak of Christmas Jumper madness thirteen years ago.
It was around this time that I went to our firm’s Christmas ‘do’ where we were all encouraged to come in a Christmas Jumper, so we can take it from this that the trend had been popularised over the preceding few years. Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001) includes a scene in which the character Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) is seen in an embarrassing sweater with a reindeer design – very similar to some of the crass examples that would soon be available in the shops. Clearly, this was an important moment in helping to promote the idea of a naff piece of knitwear worn to a Christmas party.
But who really started the ball rolling? Was it Gyles Brandreth? I can find plenty of pictures online of him wearing Christmas Jumpers that most of us wouldn’t be seen dead in, but they’re all recent photographs. A much younger Gyles can be seen in some truly hideous items of knitwear, but they don’t feature festive colours or designs.
We have to delve much further back to find the real ancestors of today’s Christmas sweaters. Images I’ve found online reveal that Christmas patterns were seen on knitwear as far back as the 1950s – perhaps even earlier – but here’s the thing: if you wanted one, you had to knit it yourself (or, preferably, get someone to knit one for you). Roger Moore modelled for knitting patterns before he was famous, but sadly I haven’t been able to find a picture of him in a Christmas jumper. I did, however, turn up this image (below) that is clearly the actor Peter Arne, appearing on a knitting pattern from, at a guess, the late 1950s.
So there we have it: not exactly a definitive answer, but an improvement on Wikipedia’s guesswork. From DIY knitters to Amazon best sellers, the Christmas jumper is a well worn tradition (see what I did there) that will – regrettably, perhaps – almost certainly endure into the forseeable future and beyond. One thing I can guarantee, though: if people are still wearing them in 2124, they’ll still look like 1980s pages from Ceefax.
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