When it comes to texture, elegance, extravagance and garments that actually feel like they have a story behind them, Daniel Thomas’ work honestly ticks every box for me. I think we’re all guilty of scrolling through Instagram a bit too quickly sometimes, barely taking in what we’re looking at before moving onto the next thing (I know I am), but whenever Daniel’s work pops up on my feed, I properly stop scrolling and spend time looking at his work. There’s always some tiny detail you didn’t notice at first, a clever bit of texture, colour, shaping or styling that makes you go back for another look, and let’s not get started on his incredibly imaginative and inspiring Outfits of the Day. I started following him way back in the day when his account was called My Chronicles of Yarnia, and it’s been thrilling to see how Daniel’s style has grown, developed and become so instantly recognisable and iconic.
Hailing from the hauntingly beautiful Isle of Man, Daniel is a genuinely multi-talented, quadruple threat in the craft world. Designer, maker, stylist (day job: Copywriter), he somehow manages to blend all of those things together into work that feels theatrical, whimsical and incredibly personal all at once, and today I was lucky enough to be able to bother him with not ten but ELEVEN (sometimes you just need one extra) questions about his life, his story, the semi-drama surrounding male knitters, jumpers inspired by cabbages and, my fave, Hamish the cow.
During my prep for this interview, I loved reading about your early life and how your grandmother introduced you to knitting and sewing at a very young age – especially her remark about crochet being “for hippies,” which made me laugh. Do you think learning from her gave knitting and craft in general an emotional meaning for you that goes beyond just technique?
Completely. My maternal grandmother was a steadfast influence throughout my childhood (which at times became a little amorphous); she helped to ground me in time and place, and bring me back to the calmness found in the repetition of craft. She was a character, and could be quite cutting with her opinions, but I mainly remember her as warm, kind, and perfectly coiffed – refusing to forgo her trademark slingbacks well into her 90s. Being shorter than five foot was no joke for her, and the heels were non-negotiable. As you alluded to in your question, she taught me to knit, sew, and embroider, but pointedly not to crochet, which I later worked out was less an aesthetic position and more a long-running comment on her sister-in-law, whose house was, though a slight exaggeration, almost entirely clad in doilies. So yes, the technical grounding came from her, but so did the sense that craft is never just craft. It carries opinions, family politics, taste, and of course, judgement. She passed on her love of fabric and clothes to me, and it’s something I wear with pride, even if it doesn’t stop her from reading my outfit for filth far in advance of the exchange of niceties when I visit her in her care home for people with dementia – she may not know my name, but she knows when she hates my trousers.
Growing up, were you aware that knitting wasn’t considered a “typical” activity for boys, or did that only become something you recognised later on?
Honestly, it’s not really something I realised at the time – it was something we did together, in her house, and so it felt as ordinary as baking or gardening. I mean, I think I came out of the womb jazz hands first, so growing up, especially in a small community, I always felt different to the other boys around me, and so I didn’t give a second thought to adding knitting into the mix. The awareness definitely crept in later, mostly through others’ reactions to me rather than through any outward realisation of mine. I do think there’s something quite useful about learning a skill in blissful ignorance before you learn that it’s supposed to be ‘for’ someone else, because, by the time the world tries to tell you otherwise, you’ve already got both the muscle memory and the opinions.
Craft is never just craft. It carries opinions, family politics, taste, and of course, judgement.
Being from the Isle of Man, do you feel that your Manx background has had any influence on your perspective as a designer or the way you approach your work?
Absolutely, though maybe not always in ways I can point to neatly. I suppose you don’t think about these things when you’re living them, but as an adult, I’ve realised that growing up on the Isle of Man brought a peculiar uniqueness to my childhood that, in retrospect, I wouldn’t swap for anything. One of my secondary schools had a farm attached to it, and we had a lesson called ‘Rural Science’ where we’d don boiler suits and muck out pigs, so those kinds of experiences would foster a desire for slowing down, connection with the earth, and a grounding in just about anyone. Alongside the making, I grew up playing the violin and mandolin, and spent a lot of time playing and singing traditional music, both in Manx and English. I think that’s where the Venn-crossover is at its most special, because the island has a particular relationship with making, partly out of practicality and partly out of heritage – growing up surrounded by these things does something to you. There’s also a slight outsider-ness to being Manx, a sense of belonging to a magical island where belief in fairies is mandated, and that most people couldn’t place on a map. That probably feeds into wanting to make things most people might not even consider – pushing myself, and my craft, as much as I can. Imagination, especially in a world of compounding absence of critical thinking through an absolute dependence on AI, is a commodity we should be pedalling harder than ever. So: believe in fairies; learn a craft; and inject some whimsy into your wardrobe, and your life!
More recently, you appeared on ITV’s Dress the Nation. Overall, was that experience a positive one for you? In such an intense environment, did it energise you creatively, or did it feel more draining at times? Was there a moment during filming where you thought, what am I actually doing here?
The way I describe it to people is: ‘knowing what I know now, I would do it again for the first time; if they ever asked me to go back, I’d politely decline.’ It was an experience. In that environment, I’d probably say that ‘draining’ and ‘energising’ aren’t really in opposition, they happen at the same time, and it’s hard to differentiate between the two. You’re running on adrenaline and very little sleep, but you’re also surrounded by other contestants who genuinely care about making things, which is rare, and honestly quite addictive. The ‘what am I doing here’ moment came very early on – the first dress I (barely) made, I lost an entire hour staring at a wall. You see the others talking and I’m just in the background, malfunctioning. It’s not often you’re given the opportunity to do something like that, and I’ve been trying to do more things that challenge me (as I’m very much a creature of habit), so I took the leap. I thought I’d come away from it feeling that I was a very bad sewist (my sewing is very much weaker than my knitting), but I actually came away with more confidence, with the caveat that I’m maybe just not so good at the very specific skill of bashing out a French-seamed dress in four hours – who knew?!
I really love the intricacy of your creations (especially as I am someone who generally focuses on more minimalist shapes and designs), and while I’m a huge fan of your garments in general, I have a particular soft spot for your more unusual pieces: Hamish the Cow’s Missoni-inspired jumper and your beautifully detailed cottage bag, for example.
What is it about more ornate work that you’re drawn to?
I think it’s partly that ornate work gives you somewhere to put your attention. A minimalist piece has to be perfect because there’s nowhere to hide, whereas something detailed invites you in and rewards looking twice. One of the reasons I enjoy making my own clothes so much is because I can make things that I can’t buy – a lot of the more minimalist knitting patterns are beautiful and really flatter the figures they adorn, but I just know that, for me, if it’s a choice between a grey funnel neck and a turquoise Romanesco-cabbage-inspired 3D jumper, I’m reaching for the latter every time. I also love the slight ridiculousness of putting that much labour into something, like Hamish’s Missoni-inspired jumper or the cottage bag, because it’s a small protest against the idea that everything has to be efficient. Hamish’s jumper was born out of a very real need – my parents bought me that footstool, and I love him, but he was getting a little thin on top after years of use, and rather than send him to Turkey for plugs, I gave him a jumper. With the cottage bag, I embroidered so many French knots I thought I might go cross-eyed, but here I am with a fixed gaze, having survived to tell the tale. If a garment can make someone laugh and then look closer, that’s my job done.
Alongside showcasing your handmade pieces, your Instagram also features beautiful #OOTD shots. How important is styling and self-presentation to you as part of the COAMREY world?
Pretty important, though I try not to take it too seriously. The pieces don’t really exist in isolation, they exist on a body, in a context, with a pair of shoes and a particular light, and the #OOTDs are part of showing how a handmade thing actually lives in the world rather than on a mannequin – and on a bigger body, at that. COAMREY isn’t really about the garments on their own, it’s about the world they sit in, and styling is how I get to write that world out loud. Loudness is an interesting concept, and not just in the sense of showing the pieces to the world, but in subverting the expectation that larger people aren’t as deserving of interesting clothes. If the outfit I put together brings a smile to my face when I’m getting ready in the morning, then that’s all that matters to me – everything else becomes irrelevant.
If a garment can make someone laugh and then look closer, that’s my job done.
Is there a craft or technique you have absolutely no interest in trying?
Tatting. I respect it enormously, I just know in my bones that I would lose my mind. Anything that fiddly with that little forgiveness is, I think, best admired from a polite distance.
Is there anything you’d love to see more of within the knitting and sewing community right now? And on the other hand, anything you’d be happy to see less of?
More weirdness and whimsy, please. More people making things that don’t quite fit a category, more menswear in particular, more colour, more risk. I apologise now for the longer list of things we should be doing better as a community. Less of the algorithm-friendly sameness, the beige rib jumper in seventeen identical reels. Less gatekeeping about what counts as ‘proper’ craft, because the snobbery cuts both ways and it puts off the exact people the community needs. Finally, less venerating of men who knit – often straight and white – who haven’t really cut their teeth, simply because it’s unexpected. Celebrate the true knowledge of those who’ve dedicated their lives to the craft. I’ve been knitting since I was seven and I’ve only comprehended the tip of an extremely deep iceberg.
Knitting definitely does still carry that stereotype of being “feminine” or domestic. Do you enjoy challenging those perceptions as a man working in menswear, particularly as part of the LGBTQI+ community?
I’m a bit wary of leaning too hard into the ‘man who knits’ framing, because the work has to stand up on its own terms, and I’d rather be interesting because of what I’m making than because of who’s making it. The stereotypes are real, but they’re also a bit boring at this point, and I don’t think the answer to them is for me to keep pointing at myself as an exception. That said, I do think there’s something worth saying about where ‘feminine’ and ‘domestic’ got their reputation in the first place – they were coded as small and unserious precisely because women were doing them, and you only have to look at the skill, patience, and engineering involved in any half-decent garment to see how silly that is. Queer culture has always been quite good at picking up the things the mainstream dismissed and treating them with the seriousness they deserved, and I’m happy to be part of that lineage. Most of all, I’d just like us to get to a point where a man with a pair of needles is as unremarkable as a man with a drill, and we can all move on to talking about the actual clothes.
What would you say has been your proudest achievement as a designer so far, and how do you personally define success?
Genuinely, the proudest moments tend to be the small ones – a commission that fits exactly right, or someone wearing a piece somewhere I’d never have imagined it. As for success, I’ve stopped defining it as scale. For me it’s about whether the work is still interesting to me, whether I’m still learning, and whether the people who wear it feel more themselves in it. If those three things are true, I’m doing fine.
And finally, what do you have coming up next that you’re excited about?
Lots, actually. I have a couple of exciting commissions I should be able to share more of soon, and some pieces I’ve been quietly developing that push the ornate side a bit further. I won’t spoil specifics because half the fun is seeing if I can actually pull them off, but if you follow @coamrey you’ll find out roughly the same time I do.
Thank you so much to Daniel for taking the time to answer these questions!
If you’d like to discover more about COAMREY, be sure to visit Daniel’s website: www.coamrey.com, his Instagram and Ravelry pages.
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