Knorts Is the Kendall Jenner-Approved Label Reinventing the Idea of Denim - Vogue

Last week, Kendall Jenner appeared on the dreamy sunset-strewn beach in a non-bikini bikini. The bathing suit-looking top was cream, knitted, and lightly streaked with candy hues of red and orange. It was by the LA-based Knorts, a label that describes itself as “denim knitwear.” Eleanore Guthrie, the designer behind it, is known for her sculptural jean creations that are anything but ordinary. Think, denim sweaters featuring nubby 3-D layers reminiscent of wavy sedimentary rock formations. Guthrie herself describes the soft sensation of Knorts as “like you rolled out of bed or walked out of yoga class,” she says, adding “But that you put effort in your outfit.”

Guthrie, 28, who moonlights as an accountant for local designers, launched Knorts back in 2014. At one point, she had been a snowboarder with hopes of going pro, but her dreams were deferred after she sustained several injuries. It was however, the micro trends and attention to gear of the snowboarding world that got her interested in the world of design and fashion. “Snowboarding would introduce me to fashion oddly enough so I decided to pursue that and ended up really loving it,” she tells Vogue over the phone from her home in Los Angeles. “And that I was a really creative person.” Guthrie also cites her time biking around her campus at Westminster College in Utah when she would wear “stiff jeans” in the winter but “knit shorts” in the summer as influential. “I thought if there was a way to create something that would be stylish and comfortable, just like my knit shorts, but something I can also wear in the winter,” she says. “That is where I thought maybe I could merge the two concepts together and I just went from there.”

The process that goes into creating a Knorts piece is hardly simple. Each item is handknit on a loom–Guthrie works with a local weaver–and then hand-dyed with Knorts’s signature vintage indigo treatment. Surprisingly, the most labor-intensive pieces appear deceptively simple. Take Knorts’s flared pants, knit by hand from blank ecru then hand-dyed in blue to give a semi stonewash feel before they’re embroidered with fat stitches down the sides and around the pockets. “The embroidery probably took me about 15 to 20 hours and the dye took me about 10 to 12 hours,” says Guthrie. Famous Fans of Knorts’s intricate handspun pieces ran the gamut of stylish musicians, from SZA to Lady Gaga to Grimes, whose creative director, Ryan Ripps, commissioned Guthrie to create merch for the singer’s Miss Anthropocene tour.

Currently, Guthrie is working on developing her “wearable canvas,” pieces—as worn by Jenner—an idea that she came up with under lockdown at home in California. “I was sitting in my place in quarantine, I had the urge to color and decorate them [denim] with the materials that I had on hand,” says Guthrie. “I started playing with them, and sharing little sneak peaks with people on Instagram, and people got very excited to see different colors.” She’s also planning to create a homeware line she conceived in the last few months which includes around-the-house comfort items—ribbed throw blankets and crocheted slippers—and triptastic, trumpet-like lampshades upcycled from knit denim samples; truly a world of interiors that’s as lived in as your favorite pair of jeans. \

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