Cloth, hands, and the patience to wait.

Fe Lusion began in a single room in Vienna in 1978, with two knitting frames and one idea that has not changed since: a garment should be made slowly, by people who are paid properly and go home on time.

Knitwear and coats on a rail beside dried pampas grass

The finishing room, Bregenzerwald atelier

The first room

I was twenty-six and I knew almost nothing about cashmere. What I did know was that the sweaters I could afford came apart after one winter, and the ones I could not afford did not. That difference — between a season and a lifetime — is still the whole of our work.

We bought our first fibre from a broker who was kind enough to sell me eleven kilos on credit. It took four months to knit it. Eleven shops took a piece each; the twelfth carried us through the following year. I have never forgotten that a business is only a long chain of people choosing to trust you.

A thing made carefully asks to be kept. That is the only sustainability I properly understand.

A village, and a longer clock

In 1994 we moved the workshop out of the city and into a village in the Bregenzerwald, where wood and wool have been worked the same way for four hundred years. Nothing about the move was efficient. The fibre travelled further, deliveries took longer, and half of Vienna told us we had lost our nerve.

What we gained was a different clock. A knitter who lives eight minutes from the frame is not in a hurry. A finisher who has walked the same road for thirty years notices when a seam sits badly, and says so. Almost everything we are proud of comes from that, and from nothing cleverer.

Raw fibre before sorting, Bregenzerwald atelier

What we ask of a material

Cashmere, linen, cotton poplin, wool. Four fibres, none of them blended to bring a price down. We buy long staple because it pills less, wash in soft water because it then needs less finishing, and dye in small lots because a large one is only cheaper if you are willing to accept the colour you are given.

It is slower and it costs more, and in forty-eight years we have not found a way around it that we were willing to live with.

The hand that finishes

A machine can knit a body in forty minutes. It cannot set a shoulder, close a seam by hand, or decide that a cuff wants two more rows. Every piece that leaves the atelier has passed through a pair of hands that were allowed to take their time.

Send a piece back whenever it needs help and we will mend it, for as long as we are here, at no charge. We would rather repair a sweater twice than sell a third.

1978

Founded in Vienna

1994

Atelier in the Bregenzerwald

112

Hands in the workshop

Countries served

What we hold to

Natural fibres only

Cashmere, linen, cotton poplin and wool. Nothing blended to bring a price down, and no fibre we cannot trace to the farm.

Made where we live

Every piece is knitted, cut and finished within an hour of the atelier, by people whose names we know.