You can have anything you want -- but not everything

I've talked about Beth before --my friend who doesn’t enjoy cooking. She’s an engineer, and cooking is not precise enough. A pinch of this, a handful of that. She would prefer a formula.

Her husband Gordon has a PhD in physics. You’d think someone who spends his days pondering Schrödinger’s cat — the one that’s simultaneously alive and dead — would be perfectly comfortable with having it both ways. But the  Schrödinger's cat thought exercise wasn’t celebrating ambiguity--it was mocking it. In the real world, the cat is alive or it’s dead. Not both. Turns out Gordon is, if anything, more practical than Beth.

Early in their marriage they had a conversation that established the way they looked at everything. Young and in love, Beth was imagining their life together — all the things they would do and see, the children they’d welcome, where they might live. You know the kind of dreamy things newlyweds talk about. Practical, yes, but she's still a romantic, and when Gordon said, “Beth, you can have anything you want,” I’m sure she had butterflies.

Then he finished the sentence.

“But you can’t have everything you want.”

How true that is. You cannot spend every penny on travel and adventure and have funds put away for your children’s education. You can’t have a big house with acres of land and live in the city center where you can walk to everything. Sometimes you have to choose. And understand the tradeoffs.

Sweaters work exactly the same way.

You saw this in the Noro trunk show try-on video. A dropped shoulder sweater is, at its heart, two rectangles. That’s the beauty of it — minimal seaming, no shaping, an easy and satisfying knit. And they work. They really do. But those two rectangles have a secret.

The “sleeve” in a dropped shoulder garment isn’t really a sleeve. There’s no cap, no shaping, no separate piece. It’s just the extra fabric from the body rectangle hanging down over your upper arm. Which means the sleeve length isn’t something you design — it’s something you get as a consequence of how wide the body is.

Take in the ease, and you take in the sleeve. All of it. What you’re left with is a little stub of fabric sitting slightly awkwardly at the top of your shoulder — not quite a sleeve, not quite a clean opening. Keep the ease, and you have a sleeve that drapes towards the elbow, but a body that feels too big.

Yes, you could sew an actual sleeve onto a dropped shoulder sweater. But that rather defeats the point, doesn’t it? You chose two rectangles for a reason.

So here’s the choice: minimal ease and no real sleeve, or a real sleeve and lots of ease in the body.

Pick one. Not both.

The ease is the sleeve.

~Ellen

Next week: what it looks like when a designer overwrites this and builds in exactly what she wants.