Jamie Lerner Talks Designing Emma Chamberlain’s Warby Parker Sweater
Photo courtesy of Jamie Lerner
When the Warby Parker and Emma Chamberlain collaboration dropped last November, people were enamored with glasses and sweaters. The sweater, an off-white color with a crew neck, had an emblem recognizable to any city dweller: the pigeon. The mind behind the sweater was New York-based knitwear designer, Jamie Lerner, Chamberlain’s stylist, Jared Ellner, requested the sweater to be custom made by Lerner, with Chamberlain’s favorite animal on the front. Lerner has also collaborated with Lisa Says Gah.
This is the second time Lerner has worked with Ellner, the designer said, mentioning a previous exchange where two years a Lerner asked if she could send Chamberlain a sweater. Ellner accepted her offer and eventually Chamberlain took a selfie in it. “It seemed like a good crossover,” Lerner said.
Photo courtesy of Jamie Lerner
The Warby Parker moment was a full circle. Lerner made the pigeon sweater in three days using her knitting machine, which is manual, she said. The design process involved drafting the sweater, pixelating the design, and buying yarn, all before getting to the knitting part. “You don’t press a button and walk away from it,” she said of the machine. “I have to drop in every thread for every row that's part of the pigeon, individually.” Then, she weaved in all of the hanging threads by hand. The sleeves are attached via the machine, but the neck is done by hand.
As a child, she learned how to knit a bookmark, and then never knitted again. Lerner got back into the craft in 2019, after learning embroidery and hand sewing. She found sewing to be challenging because of the precise measurements needed to make a garment. “Knitting is a lot more forgiving,” she said, adding that she was inspired to learn after seeing a chunky knit sweater online.
Her experience in sewing aided in making her first sweater and helped her piece things together. “The back of a sweater is just a square, and each side of the cardigan is a rectangle. The sleeve is a rectangle folded over,” Lerner said. Over time, she added new skills to her repertoire, like ribbing to prevent curled edges, creating V-necks and adding buttons, and making smiley faces. “You can think of it as pixel art,” she said. “It'd be like four pixels, and it grows to six. If you can make something in pixels, you can make it in knitting.” Over time, these designs, made through intarsia (a technique used to make patterns), became her signature, she added. Her sweater designs include a race car, skier, and martini glass. Lerner finds inspiration in many things, and “I started looking at everything in terms of, ‘can this be made into pixel art?’”
Photo courtesy of Jamie Lerner
Her designs gained her more than 15,000 followers on Instagram, where she promotes her shop selling sweaters and accessories. Seeing Emma Chamberlain wearing one of her sweaters on posters across the country was one of her favorite parts of the Warby Parker campaign. “If I’m walking past the sign and there’s a bunch of people getting off the subway, I'm like, ‘those people don't know I made that sweater,’” she said. Lerner rejoiced in having that “secret knowledge,” and felt proud looking at the posters.
Following the campaign, she connected with fellow artists and decided to start knitting at a slower pace as a result of the heightened awareness of her brand. Lerner’s curious about what will happen in future and has a few sweater designs in her backlog. “I haven't published a sweater for sale on my website since July, so, I hope they're still received well,” she said.
Lerner added that she’s knitting sweaters in different colors and making fun design choices like deciding whether her garments have scalloped edges, or high or low necks. “My style requires some perfection because I use solid colors, but I really admire it when people add different textures. I don't know if it's [because] they let loose or that’s just their vision,” she said. “Adding mohair and making funky things is really cool. I love what everybody's making...and how many people are saying ‘I'm going to learn to knit.”
Photo courtesy of Jamie Lerner
Article by Daryl Perry, Contributor, PhotoBook Magazine
Tearsheets by Alexa Dyer, Graphic Designer, PhotoBook Magazine
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