WALK THIS WAY: Willis makes her shooting socks in a factory in Gloucester, England, on a Victorian machine known as a Griswold.
EMMA WILLIS
EMMA WILLIS was, if you’ll excuse the pun, cut out for a career in shirts. After art school and a stint as a singer-songwriter, she spent the late 1980s selling shirts desk to desk in London, before opening her eponymous shop on Jermyn Street a little more than 15 years ago. It looks like a pretty corner of the fashionable members’ club 5 Hertford Street and serves many of the same sorts of people, from hedge funders to the occasional duke. But what I like most about Willis is not so much her rich, grand or fashionable supporters but the fact that she enlarges my knowledge of men’s attire. Had it not been for her, I would never have become acquainted with the Griswold.
The Griswold is a circular, tabletop knitting machine that is used to make what smart men’s out fitters call heavy hose—shooting socks, walking socks, that kind of thing. To my taste, the best thing about the Griswold is that it ought to be in a museum.