Woolmark's Wool Lab A/W line to launch at Pitti Uomo

The Wool Lab, a seasonal guide to the most inspiring wool trends and best products, is created to inspire and inform fashion professionals regarding the infinite potential of Merino wool.

A trendbook and a sourcing guide, the tool is the result of extensive research undertaken by The Woolmark Company through its global network to select the best wool products worldwide and identify the emerging trends emerging from fashion, design, art, pop culture, music and other fields.

The Wool Lab is created each season in collaboration with the world’s most innovative and quality-oriented spinners and weavers. It is a collection of the most beautiful wool products, commercially available, and in line with the leading fashion and textile trends.

The tool is available free of charge and upon request for designers, manufacturers, retailers, fashion and apparel brands and to all the professionals of the fashion industry, to provide a concrete sourcing service, putting them in contact with the world’s best wool suppliers.

For Autumn Winter 2014/15 the guide proposes seven inspirational themes: The Club, Highlands, Simple Chic, Fairy Tale, Street Market, Cinque Ports, Xtreme Knitwear &
Highlands

1. The Club

This theme is inspired by the relaxed but sophisticated elegance of the members of the prestigious London Clubs, well suiting the increasingly evident look for a formal but contemporary elegance. Classic fabrics mostly worsted. The patterns contain a bit of nostalgia for the early-1900s.

Materials are extremely luxurious like 100% extrafine Merino wool or mixes of precious Merino wool with other noble fibres such as silk, mohair, cashmere and alpaca. Structures and patterns are retro, revisited with a contemporary touch: pin stripes, regimental stripes, twill and cavalry twill, Glen Check, herringbone and Prince of Wales, satin and beaver. Knitwear is coherent with the timeless elegance of the whole trend and mainly concerns very fine worsted wool yarns.

2. Highlands

The mood was inspired by two trends becoming more and more evident: the coming back of the jacket and of tweed or tweed-look fabrics, interpreting a new concept of luxury which is more authentic and close to natural things, with a romance and a history behind it.

The atmosphere and the colours are ones of the English Highland's nature, immediately associated to very traditional UK fabrics and knits, such as tweeds and Shetlands in warm mélanges. Materials are predominantly in 100% wool worsted and carded. The structures and patterns are those of classic tweed, sonegal and Shetland, herringbone, twill, overcheck and hound's tooth.

The knitwear is a feast for the classic Made in Britain taste, featuring mouliné and melange, knoppy yarns, plus jacquard jersey and tweed and donegal knits.