Jumpers/Sweaters … call them what you will - they’re fun!

Soon after Gyles Brandreth founded the National Scrabble Championships in 1971, someone gave him a jumper featuring a Scrabble board as part of its design.  Gyles wore the jumper on TV and quickly realised that on TV what you wear gets more attention than what you say.  Through the 1970s and 1980s he wore more than a thousand different jumpers on TV, many of them designed by George Hostler (1939-2018), who also designed knitwear for Diana, Princess of Wales, and Elton John. 

When Gyles went into politics in the 1990s, he stopped wearing the jumpers, but all these years later people still remember them.  Over the years, he has auctioned scores of them for charity, but he still keeps a few favourites hidden in the basement.  In the 1980s he was a director of the New for Knitting hand-wool shops and published several books of knitting patterns.  In 2014, with his daughter Saethryd, he published Novelty Knits, a collection of thirty-five of his favourite jumpers, modelled by family and friends. In 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, on the basis that ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’, Gyles brought some of his favourite jumpers out of the closet and shared a jumper-a-day (and a poem-a-day) with his followers on Twitter (@GylesB1) and on Instagram (@gylesbrandreth).

In 2020 Rowing Blazers of New York decided it was time to revive the Gyles and George fashion brand and launched the Gyles and George jumper label. Visit www.gylesandgeorge.com to find out how you can own an original Gyles and George sweater of your own - starting with one of Gyles and George’s (and Princess Diana’s) favourites.

From now until Christmas, the Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery has a special exhibition celebrating Gyles’ jumpers. Petersfield is in Hampshire in the UK. Discover more here: https://petersfieldmuseum.co.uk