My fluffy contribution to high couture

Those of you at K's & P's will know that I was busy knitting some fluffy mohair hats for my friend Sara's final year project. She did knitwear for her MA in Fashion at Saint Martin's. Much to everyone's dismay, she wasn't selected for the cat-walk show despite having worked so hard these last 9 stressful months. Anyway, I saw the ones that were selected and they were pretty insipid and unimaginative. Ludicrously sculptured outfits that a Guardian journalist called the 'Zoolander' look. Whilst I'm not into bling myself, I thought Sara's idea of studding knitwear was ingenious and a bold way of updating the dowdy image that knitwear generally has.

These terrible photos were taken at her exhibition recently and what they fail to capture is the hours of painstaking, finger-aching work that went into placing each and every stud in those intricate patterns resembling intarsia.

Sara got a pretty good spot in the exhibition compared to some poor students who were stuck in a grotty corner but it was sad to see these beautiful garments just hanging limply when they deserved to be displayed in all their gorgeous dimensions.

Don't those fluffy hats look sweet? (Ahem!) Some of them got studded too which made them look pretty gangsta. Now THAT's something you don't usually find in the woolly world of knitwear.

p.s. speaking of 'gangsta' and opposites, I saw Pete Docherty this morning on my way to work and he looked like a right old pasty, weedy, indie-boy.