FUTURE VINTAGE / Scotland
Founded by Lindsay Girvan in 2023, Future Vintage grew from a deep love of Scotland’s textile heritage and a frustration with how far wool had fallen in value. Discovering that an entire trailer of carefully harvested fleece could fetch just £7.50 brought home the absurdity: how had such a beautiful, natural and endlessly renewable fibre come to be worth so little?
Future Vintage is Lindsay’s answer. Working with the wool of a pedigree Shetland flock, she follows the fibre from sheep to finished garment, allowing the land and animals themselves to become part of the design process. The sheep’s natural shades – white, moorit, black and katmoget – create the palette, while breeding decisions influence the colours of fleeces still to come. Each year brings a new wool “crop”, and with it a new “Vintage”, particular to that flock, place and moment in time.
The fleece is hand-sorted, spun in small batches and knitted on vintage Dubied machines before being finished by hand. The resulting “Shepherd’s Wardrobe” draws on the practicality and endurance of Scottish knitwear: clothes to work and live in, to mend and keep, and eventually pass on. In giving value back to the fibre, Future Vintage also keeps alive the skills, stories and agricultural heritage held within it.
