There is a running joke in my friendship group that if I’m spotted out in a cardigan, chances are, I’m seeing someone new. You see, I once made the mistake of telling everyone I know that, in my martini-loosened opinion, the humble little cardigan is the sexiest garment on the planet. This was long before Cynthia Erivo wore one in Wicked: For Good to lure Jonathan Bailey into bed, and well before Prada showed completely unencumbered cardies worn over baggy, bra-like tops last September. Within a month of my declaration, I started bumping into friends in their own cardigans. “So, who is he?” became my standard greeting.
I’m not talking about chunky, hand-knitted cardigans – although they possess their own, altogether different, Sunday-morning sex appeal. I mean a slinky, sinuous little cardigan, abbreviated just above the waist, hugging all the right places. As soft and light as a feather, these precious pieces of knitwear feel less brazenly sexual and more suggestive – a whisper rather than a shout. Most of all, they evoke a word that’s very rarely used to describe me: “ladylike”.
Listen, I’m not a girly girl. I’ll take sex-shop black PVC over dusky pastels any day, and gossamer ruffles of chiffon and precious satin bows do little to whet my savoury sartorial appetite. But perhaps it’s the associations with so many archaic tropes of femininity – Mad Men secretaries, Stepford wives, country club twinsets and, well, corgis (all of which feel worlds away from my life in east London) – that make something as prim and proper as a cardigan feel ripe for reinvention. After all, sex isn’t as simple as it once was – just ask anyone with a Feeld account. What once shocked – naked dresses, incendiary slits, exposed underwear – is now practically office-appropriate for a generation who have divorced sex from smut.
That might explain why, on the stock exchange of style, bombastic sexuality has slipped into decline, while soigné sophistication with a dash of prim has strengthened as currency. Where dressing like a “lady” once echoed a headmistress extolling propriety, today it can feel as kinky as lace-up boots. It’s all in the soft, sensual suggestion, which brings me back to the cardigan. The act of buttoning up can imply the opposite: becoming unbuttoned. In the case of my current favourite – a black pointelle one by Cou Cou Intimates, worn over a satin Bordelle bra – it practically unbuttons itself, much to the dismay (or delight) of my dinner companions.
Such are the multitudes of femininity that one small knitted item can contain such range. On the Richter scale of controversy, it spans from Michelle Obama causing uproar by wearing an abbreviated Alaïa cardigan to Buckingham Palace to Britney Spears’s charcoal “…Baby One More Time” school uniform. The paradoxical cardigan can make denim feel classic and a floor-length skirt feel approachable. It can be demure, but also flirty. But perhaps what makes it sexy is that it is – take a deep breath here – comfortable, the one word women are so often taught sex isn’t meant to be.
Word must have got out, because several designers answered my call for more sexy, yet interesting, little cardigans in their s/s ’26 collections. At Chanel – a house where the cardigan was practically canonised (Coco hated how pullover sweaters ruined her hair) – newcomer Matthieu Blazy debuted an updated version of the buttoned-up Chanel suit: a long black knitted cardigan, sinuous at the waist and flared at the hip, alongside swoon-worthy boxy Lesage-embroidered styles worn with lace-trimmed camisoles and over pencil skirts.
Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior collection, meanwhile, gave the grey schoolgirl cardie a conceptual edge: slouchy and plunging, with a knotted, tasselled shawl collar draped to one side. McQueen showed one slipping off the shoulder and undone at the midriff, blooming with macramé corsages and worn with low-cut cargo trousers. And August Barron, the hot-right-now indie label subverting the idea of the suburban housewife, presented multilayered pastel cardies flashed open to reveal lace-trimmed lingerie, a little more Belle de Jour than TikTok tradwife. “There’s something inherently perverse about the cardigan – like it’s begging to be unbuttoned,” explain designers Benjamin Barron and Bror August Vestbø, who are radicalising what they see as a “symbol of composure”.
