QUADROPHILIA: THE ETERNAL APPEAL OF CHECK PATTERNS
Among the many unsung heroes of menswear — and their number includes a range of figures, from needle-wielding artisans on Savile Row to the technical wizards who maintain giant decatising machines — are pattern designers who cast their esoteric spells in the corner offices of the world’s wool mills.
Dreaming up patterns is just the start of their remit: from here, they are responsible for coming up with dizzying mathematical formulas that direct the precise order in which weft and warp ends will interlace, then writing those formulas out by hand for machine operators to programme, then creating a peg plan (the principle of which calls to mind a self-playing fairground organ’s pinned barrel) that dictates the order in which each shaft on a loom should lift, and to what height, in order to make the pattern unfurl, in all its magical intricacy, from
