Threads of Thought: An Interview with S.N.S. Herning on Craft, Constraint, and the Future of Knitwear.

There are brands you admire from afar, and then there are those you feel you’ve somehow known your whole life - not because they’re nostalgic, but because they speak in a language you didn’t realise you were fluent in until the conversation began. S.N.S. Herning is emphatically the latter.

To encounter the Danish knitwear house is to recognise a peculiar kind of seriousness - the sort found not in grand manifestos but in people who understand the quiet dignity of doing one thing exceptionally well for a very long time. Founded in 1919 by Søren Nielsen Skyt, the brand emerged from a mathematical riddle wrapped in wool: how to keep fishermen warm in brutal North Sea winds without burying them in unnecessary weight. The now-legendary bubble knit was the answer, a functional geometry that somehow became an aesthetic grammar. A century later, it remains one of the most intellectually intriguing textiles in contemporary fashion - a form born from physics, not trend forecasting.

Spend even a few minutes exploring S.N.S. Herning’s world and you discover the paradox that defines it: an uncompromising commitment to heritage paired with a near-monastic refusal to stand still. It’s not nostalgia; it’s an ongoing philosophical argument conducted through yarn. The brand’s credo - “Do your best - to make your best better” - reads like something you’d find carved into wood at the entrance to a workshop where the craftsperson is also secretly a phenomenologist.

When your knitwear has more discipline than most modern architecture - and still manages to look effortlessly cooler.

What makes S.N.S. Herning instantly magnetic is that the company approaches clothing the way others approach architecture: with rules, with respect, with an understanding that constraint is not a limitation but a propulsion system. They treat history not as a moodboard but as a set of principles - a kind of inherited alphabet from which new sentences can be written. Their design language is ascetic but not cold, technical but never clinical. Emotional without demanding attention. In a fashion landscape obsessed with novelty, their restraint feels almost rebellious.

The more one learns - about the punch-card knitting machines from the 1960s that still hum away in Denmark, about the careful geographic choreography between Denmark, Latvia and Italy, about the signature of the maker written in ballpoint pen inside each garment - the clearer it becomes that S.N.S. Herning is not merely making sweaters. It is cultivating a culture. A school of thought conducted in wool, guided by discipline rather than spectacle.

It’s little wonder we felt an immediate kinship. The brand’s ethos - rooted in precision, continuity, and a refusal to dilute an idea - mirrors the values we hold at Time ∴ Tide. The belief that craft should endure. The conviction that design is a form of storytelling. The understanding that slowness, when practised with intent, becomes a luxury far more meaningful than anything embossed in gold foil.

Our conversation with Søren Nikolaj Skyt, third-generation custodian of the house, only deepened that impression. He speaks about knitwear with the kind of clarity and philosophical curiosity that makes you look down at your own sweater and wonder whether you’ve been underestimating its existential potential. Without giving anything away, his responses reveal a mindset that is part craftsperson, part engineer, part monk, part futurist.

What follows is not an interview about fashion. It is a discussion about discipline, narrative, resistance, memory, time, and the strange beauty of making something honestly in an age addicted to shortcuts.

In other words: pure S.N.S. Herning.

“Do your best - to make your best better” sounds deceptively simple, almost monastic. How do you translate that credo into a design process? Is it a quiet discipline, or does it feel like a constant wrestle between humility and ambition at the knitting machine?

Søren Nikolaj Skyt: To make our best better is a credo meant to guard against complacency. It protects us from the comforting but misleading belief that we have already reached our highest level. The company was founded on the challenge of solving a topological problem: how to achieve maximum insulation using as little wool as possible. It would be easy to claim that the essential inventing is already done. The credo serves as a reminder that the inventive mindset must remain ongoing. We should keep questioning our past principles to ensure that a better solution is not within reach.

This connects directly to another credo: No changes, only improvements. Each garment carries a specific idea, almost a thesis about form, function and efficiency. Our work is an ongoing effort to articulate that idea with greater clarity, precision and fidelity. Improvements must deepen the idea, not dilute it. We hold deep respect for our oldest designs and we do not alter them lightly. The core intention remains constant. At the same time we continue to search for more precise and more truthful ways to express that intention through design and construction.

Scarves, hats, and blankets in Denmark; garments in Latvia and Italy - it’s a map of craftsmanship rather than mass production. How do you decide what deserves the Danish touch versus what benefits from Italian or Baltic expertise? Is geography a design tool in itself?

The split is rooted in production capabilities. From the 1980s onward, most knitting mills left Denmark for Poland, Portugal, the Baltic countries and later China. This migration broke the ecosystem. Sewing mills had always been tightly linked to knitting mills, and when one disappeared the other followed.

In 2003 we re-opened a knitting mill in Denmark, but the local capacity for sewing was almost gone. We formed a joint venture with a Danish owner of a sewing mill in Riga and worked in that structure for fifteen years: knitting in Denmark and sewing in Riga. By 2018 it became clear that the best final quality required a consolidated production setup, so we moved all machines to Riga.

Six months later we found a gap in knowledge. The knitters in Riga did not understand how to operate our punch card machines from the 1960s. At the same time Holger, son of the founder, was frustrated spending his days cutting cardboard boxes instead of working with the craft he knew. We decided to bring seven machines back to Denmark and establish a small micro mill focused on blankets, scarves and beanies, styles that require minimal sewing.

The division between Latvia and Italy follows the same logic of capability. Latvia produces our core signature styles that remain consistent year after year. Italy handles our fully fashioned knits, which require a different set of techniques and machinery. Geography becomes a design tool only in the sense that each place holds the specific expertise needed to realize a particular type of garment at the highest level.

S.N.S. Herning’s legacy began with fishermen’s sweaters and utilitarian design. When you design today, do you imagine a fisherman, an architect, or a flâneur walking through Copenhagen? Who are you really dressing – the past, or the present’s idea of the past?

Søren Nikolaj Skyt: My approach to design is somewhat idiosyncratic. I have little interest in fashion, and I rarely think about end consumers, whether a fisherman, an architect or a Parisian flaneur. The origin point for a design is something much more private.

You phrase the question elegantly. Are we dressing the past, or the present’s idea of the past. As for the latter, I do not like that position at all. Of course we keep our core designs intact, but we also feel an obligation to bring in something radically new. The only condition is that the new element must remain within the limitations given by our own history.

The only man who can talk about wool with such philosophical precision you start questioning your own sweater’s life choices.

A story about our hangtag illustrates this approach. The tag was first drawn by hand in 1948. It shows two fishermen in a dinghy pulling in a net. Below the S. N. S. Herning name it reads INDREGISTR. VAREMÆRKE, meaning registered trademark. When we updated the hangtag in 2003, it felt wrong to use a contemporary font on the reverse side. We created a simple rule instead. We could only use the thirteen letters that already appeared on the front. The past defined the alphabet, but within that alphabet we were free to write anything.

Kant formulates a similar idea in another domain. He imagines a bird dreaming of a world without air resistance, not understanding that the resistance is what makes flight possible. The limitations we place on ourselves function in the same way. They give us the resistance that allows something original to emerge. With luck, an idea created under these constraints may become a departure point for future generations. Assuming they will have a world to inhabit.

The bubble knit is practically sacred in the S.N.S. vocabulary. Do you ever feel tempted to commit a bit of heresy - to flatten the bubbles, disrupt the geometry, or sneak in something irreverent? Where does reverence end and rebellion begin?

Søren Nikolaj Skyt:: We never feel the need to destroy or dishonor the holy, not the bubble, not the symbolic, not the spiritual. The defining trait of our bubble is that it does not flatten with wear, because flattening would compromise its function. That gives us a clear boundary. What cannot be lost is the performance.

What we do enjoy is referencing the idea of the bubble in many different ways. We work with textures that echo the creation of a three dimensional surface. We repeat the sequence of the bubble pattern but translate it into stripes. We also pursue a more philosophical variation, asking how we might achieve what the bubble achieves through an entirely new construction.

In practice the bubbles offer both warmth and comfort, and in some places on a garment they function purely as aesthetic punctuation. That interplay between function and beauty is what we hold in highest regard from the original fisherman sweater. If there is one guiding principle it is this: make the functional beautiful.

Every place stitches its own temperament into fabric. Latvia brings precision, Italy romance, Denmark restraint. How do you ensure the final piece still feels like Herning – that quiet confidence in a world that loves to shout?

Søren Nikolaj Skyt:: It does not matter where a garment is made. Quality is never a question of country. It is a question of approach, pride and attitude. We work only with long trusted partners. For example, our collaboration with Riga began in 2003. What matters to us is installing a sense of pride in the people who perform the manufacturing.

In 2003 we began signing all knits with a ballpoint pen. When production moved, we kept that practice alive in Latvia and in Italy. If a product can be traced directly to the person who made it, we feel we are already close to the right sentiment.

When this personal accountability is paired with our strictly rule based design system, the alphabet we work within, we never doubt whether a finished piece feels like us. Whatever place produced it, the garment returns home with the correct character and the correct ethos, ready to be a fully rightful part of our family of knits.

Scandinavian design often leans on restraint, yet your knits feel emotional - almost narrative in their tactility. Is this intentional storytelling, or does emotion simply seep through the yarn when a brand has been knitting for a century?

Søren Nikolaj Skyt: Emotions are functional and powerful, and I understand the tension you point to. This question is perhaps the most brilliant one I have ever received, and any answer I give will be tentative and brief. You created a beautiful phrase with narrative in their tactility, because texture, tactility and narrative sit at the very core of our design ethos.

It is all a narrative. That is not a metaphor. We want every past collection to be readable as part of one continuous story, with recurring themes woven into the garments and waiting to be discovered by an attentive recipient. It is thus a private emotive language, though not in the Wittgensteinian sense. So yes, it is very intentional storytelling, but addressed to a very limited number of recipients. And maybe it is important to add that the narrative is an addition for personal and emotional reasons. At the core we simply make strong and beautiful garments, and they should be able to speak for themselves.

As a quiet acknowledgment of this idea, we began selling directly from our archives in a project we call Distributed Archive. It allows the older stories to circulate again, to be encountered anew or, in many cases, to be heard for the very first time.

While the rest of fashion debates carbon footprints, S.N.S. Herning quietly keeps making garments that last decades. Is true sustainability simply a byproduct of good design and better discipline – or do you see it as a conscious modern responsibility?

Søren Nikolaj Skyt: We have practiced sustainability long before the modern language for it was invented, and in some cases distorted. For us it is brutally simple. Everything depends on emotional connection. Our task is to make a strong product, using ethical methods and a strong natural material like wool. But the crucial part lies elsewhere. It is about whether we succeed in creating a feeling of attachment in the person who wears the garment.

If we achieve that, the owner will care for the garment and keep it for many years. We have examples of men who have worn the same sweater for five decades, sometimes even passing it on. If a lifespan like that is reached, the sustainability question largely takes care of itself.

We are currently working on new practices that allow a user to have a garment repaired locally, and we compensate with webshop vouchers. In this way we support the longevity of the garment, avoid unnecessary shipping, and help keep local mending practices with tailors alive.

Your credo suggests relentless improvement - but perfection can be a creative trap. How do you know when a piece is “good enough” to stop refining, or does each new collection feel like a meditation on your own inability to leave things alone?

Søren Nikolaj Skyt: When I was a child my father would tell me, after I had spent the final day frantically finishing an essay, that as long as I did my best it was good enough. I remember dreading that reply. How do you know if you did your best. And what does good enough even mean. That voice still lingers when a new collection is taking shape.

Fortunately, reality intervenes in the form of a deadline. At some point you have to acknowledge that this is the best we can do for now. The work stops, the season closes, and a new one appears on the horizon. The drive is a push, not an arbiter of truth. And in the end you accept that the work will continue its life beyond you, and someone else may one day find a way to do it better. The inability to leave things alone becomes less a burden and more a rhythm, a way of moving forward in measured steps, always trying to make our best better without pretending that perfection is achievable.

There’s something subversive about taking time today - to knit, to think, to make. Do you see slowness as a form of luxury? And does that pace ever clash with the expectations of modern commerce, where everyone wants everything yesterday?

Søren Nikolaj Skyt: The most beautiful state of mind I know is deep focus. When you are fully absorbed in something that is difficult enough to hold your attention but not so difficult that you abandon it. Some call it a state of flow. Today we are surrounded by devices designed to break that state. So slowness is indeed a kind of luxury, but not one reserved for the wealthy. It is available to anyone who is willing to remove the distractions. It is not like waiting for a solar eclipse with binoculars, a rare moment that you hope to catch. It is always there, ready to return if you clear the space for it.

Commerce often works in the opposite direction. It distracts you before you have the time to reflect on what you actually need instead of what you desire in the moment. As manufacturers we have a responsibility to avoid that pitfall. We are not holy. We want to sell sweaters too. But we do not want anyone to regret a purchase, or have any reason to. Slow N’ Steady, S. N. S.

If S.N.S. Herning’s sweaters could speak, they’d likely mumble something philosophical in wool. What do you want them to say in the next 10 years? Is the future of knitwear digital, biodegradable, or just beautifully stubbornly analog?

Søren Nikolaj Skyt: I am not sure a ten year timeline makes much sense. I am an avid believer in a Kurzweilian technological singularity. When you look at the pace at which language models evolve, and even more so the models built on new architectures, the path from AGI to ASI feels inevitable. I would prefer not to be quoted on that position, because it makes it harder to keep hope intact for my three girls.

Setting dystopia aside, I do think the future will always hold space for analog machines. They maintain a direct physical connection that digital systems cannot replace. Knitwear belongs to that category. It is made through touch, rhythm and mechanical intimacy.

One domain still outside the reach of a digital overlord is the spiritual. I can imagine a return to a fundamentally spiritual understanding of life, a perspective that values presence and meaning over acceleration. If our sweaters are to say anything in the coming years, I hope they whisper something human in that direction.

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Words and questions by AW.

Answers by Søren Nikolaj Skyt.

Photos courtesy of S.N.S. Herning & Herning Folkeblad.