Not All Sweaters are Garbage and Buying An Internet-Famous Thing

Does the Babaà jumper live up to its hype? Depends on who you ask.

I don’t remember exactly when Babaà appeared in my consciousness (say, 2018?), but I can say with confidence that at some point in Internet history, it felt like every cute jumper I admired on the people I followed on IG was a Babaà jumper. Like Kamm pants, Misha & Puff popcorn sweaters (another cult jumper!), Rudy Jude jeans, and Beatrice Valenzuela slides, there was no escape from a Babaà jumper if you were into the “cool art teacher” aesthetic (which I genuinely was, no snark intended), the type that gets featured on A Cup of Jo.

I admired the Babaà jumpers, but I felt no urge whatsoever to buy one, because back then, I lived in tropical Singapore, and I wore wool jumpers maybe two out of 365 days a year. For years, I owned exactly two lightweight merino wool jumpers, both navy, and sufficient for the odd vacation to cooler climes. In 2016, with a wintertime trip to Mongolia and Russia looming (the -40°C kind of winter), I bought a heavy lambswool jumper from Uniqlo U. I wore it with borrowed coats and felt so very warm, and then I didn’t wear it again for six years.

Lovely as Babaà jumpers were, spending 250 euros on one was very far from my mind, but this changed after I moved to Melbourne in 2022. My older jumpers are all still great, but they fit tighter than they used to, and working from home in winter, I craved a cozy, oversized jumper that I could throw more easily over my clothes. I started borrowing my husband’s jumpers, and naturally, this made me want an oversized, woolly, cuddly piece of joy of my own.

You might wonder at this point why, living in Australia, a country that produces so much quality merino and alpaca wool, did my mind wander afar to Babaà, a brand from Spain? Well, aesthetics, obviously. Internet-influenced aesthetics, to be exact. I fell down the same rabbit hole as this New Yorker writer, my mind filled with a parade of my favourite influencers looking impossibly cool in luxuriously oversized jumpers. I became fluent in the litany of IG-famous, pure wool jumpers that were mindfully made in places like Peru, Scotland, and Ireland—Jaggery, L’envers, &Daughter, Jenni Kayne, Charl, and of course, Babaà, which is made in Spain.

I’d thought a Babaà jumper was expensive, but soon, I learnt that even though all our sweaters are garbage, seemingly good quality options exist for those with lots of money, and Babaà was for some, a mere entry-level purchase to this fancy universe. I ogled a Shaina Mote alpaca-merino Cropped Chunky Crewneck that cost US$453. The &Daughter lambswool Fintra turtleneck is about US$400. The Shetland wool Harrison jumper by Charl knitwear is US$375. The Lauren Manoogian Bateau Rollneck is US$470 (and it’s a cotton-merino blend, rather than pure wool). The Jenni Kayne Cocoon Crewneck in alpaca is US$345; their cashmere options run over US$400. Speaking of cashmere, one can buy a US$1,395 12-ply cashmere cardigan from O’Connell, or a rollneck poncho, also in 12-ply cashmere, from Crimson Cashmere, for US$1,504.

I’m not an expert on pricing, but I don’t expect jumpers to be cheap in our economy, because 1) really good wool, especially cashmere, doesn’t come cheap if it has been ethically farmed; and 2) knitting, whether done by machine or entirely by hand (and even machines require skilled operators and immense labour), is a craft that requires a lot of skill and time. When even COS is selling US$250 cashmere jumpers, I didn’t mind paying the same or even more for something produced with care.

Plus, I happen to love wool. I love how it offers warmth and breathability, how it’s pretty easy to care for, and how incredibly durable it is, which appeals to my penchant for hardworking clothes.

Unfortunately, the quality of a jumper is incredibly hard to assess right off the bat, even when you’re in a store actually touching them. We can school ourselves in the general qualities of different wools (cashmere vs Shetland wool and so on) but as buyers we know nothing about the actual yarn actually used to make the jumper—the quality of yarn only reveals itself through wear and tear. Softness means nothing— you can process anything to make it irresistibly soft on first contact. Pilling is something you can look out for—it is inevitable in nearly all jumpers, but good quality yarn is made using longer fibres with high twist factor, and therefore more resistant to pilling. But this is something that’s only revealed with time.

Another thing that affects quality is the knit—it should be tight yet flexible and the stitches regular and nicely finished. Slack knitting not only compromises a jumper’s thermal regulation properties, it also means the item will lose its shape more easily over time. But again, this isn’t always obvious when you’re buying a jumper in store, and it’s definitely impossible to tell when buying a jumper online.

This leaves most of us consumers having to take a punt on a brand’s reputation and reviews, or turning to the rich world of secondhand jumpers¹, where quality and affordability do intersect with patience and a bit of luck.

On my side of the world, I have could bought an NZ-made merino wool jumper from Standard Issue for US$190, or an Australia-made McIntyre Merino fisherman’s sweater for about US$235. Both were nice, polite options—perfect if I were looking for something classic, but I wasn’t. I already had classic. I wanted slouchy, Instagram cool.

In the end, I went with aesthetics. I ordered a Babaà jumper in their winter sale: the No. 67 in Arce.

The no. 67 jumper on me. Most of the volume is in the sleeve, which I like since I expect to wear this mostly on its own, rather than under a jacket or coat. The colour runs warm but it also looks cool-toned in certain light. I like that it has a huge collar for me to play with depending on my mood.

The jumper arrived mere days later (so efficient!), a warm tomato red bundle of wool with a sweeping turtleneck collar that covered half my face when turned up, and sleeves so voluminous I could fit both my arms in them, with room to spare. I loved it, or did I?

The yarn was soft and warm, the fit and colour impeccable. I had been worried about the itch factor; I don’t have wool sensitivity, but many people have reported finding Babaà’s raw, unprocessed wool sweaters intolerably itchy, so I was apprehensive; thankfully it didn’t bother me at all.

But the knitting, though regular and nicely finished, was more slack than I’d expected. Most of my jumpers are fine knit, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I ordered this. To be fair, it was sturdy; it’s just not as sturdy as I had hoped for.

This was perhaps, unsurprising. When I mentioned I was interested in a Babaà jumper in a previous post, the feedback from readers was a mixed bag, in line with the reviews I’d read online. The brand has its diehard fans, but there were also a good number of people who were unimpressed by the quality of their woollen jumpers, and found Babaà overhyped.

In terms of quality, I have to agree, it is overhyped and I have definitely handled sturdier jumpers, but just because something is overhyped doesn’t mean it’s objectively bad. After thinking through all its qualities, the Babaà jumper still stands out from for me. I appreciate their production methods. I love their range of rich, unique colours. The generous slouch of their oversized styles set them apart from other brands. They may not be the best quality, but they are good quality nonetheless. At the end of the day, I’d wanted something ethically produced, well-made and of a very particular style, and Babaà delivered.

That said, on the subject of style, which was a pretty big deciding factor, I did have nagging doubts about buying a jumper that was instantly recognisable to people who care about these things. Having spent the last six or seven years being exposed to Babaà, I found that I could easily identify their jumpers on social media. And with it, I could also associate a specific aesthetic, a specific lifestyle, a specific aspiration. When I wore my Babaà jumper, I wondered, did people recognise it, and were they projecting the same associations on me?

In short, I had bought an Internet-famous thing, and it made me feel a little sheepish. Was it because of all the chatter over the internet about the importance of taste and the death of personal style? Was I just another victim of social media algorithms² and canny marketing? Although I would have never discovered Babaà without social media, I also kind of wished it wasn’t all over social media. It felt like by putting on a Babaà jumper, I was sending out a very specific message about myself, and as a longtime wallflower, this made me deeply uncomfortable.

Thankfully, I live with a partner who has no idea what Babaà is, and he brought me back down to earth. When he saw the jumper, he loved it and immediately tried it on (luckily the sleeves were too short for him so I don’t have to share). For him, the Babaà jumper is free of its social media associations; it is just a very nice, very red, very warm, and very oversized jumper. His reaction made me realised I was spending too much time on the internet and a little to vulnerable to its attendant trends. I had forgotten that as viral as trends might be online, they don’t really dominate our physical lives to the same degree. Like my husband, my friends do not know what Babaà is, and if I tried to describe to the idea of humble-yet-posh “status sweater” to them, they would think I’ve lost my mind.

The internet can be a wild place—it allows you to find things you like and develop your taste, then it tries to influence your taste, and then it questions whether your taste has been overly influenced and suggests that maybe you have no taste at all. Yet our lives are bigger than social media, and while an algorithm can influence me to buy something, I know it is only one of many factors that influence me, and it’s completely irrelevant to the memories I will make in the jumper in the years to come. Letting the internet dictate how I feel about a perfectly decent garment was silly.

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If you made this far, congratulations! And of course there is a sequel to this sweater saga.

In my neighbourhood in Melbourne, there is a vintage clothing store across the road from the supermarket where I do my weekly shop. I always slow down for a look when I pass by—the prices are a little high but the selection is decent; usually non-designer vintage from the 1970s-90s, chosen with an eye for decent fabrics and workmanship.

The vintage jumper above caught my eye earlier this week, right before I took off for Singapore. In my hunt for jumpers, I had come to admire the craft of knitting and the intricate magic that a skilled maker can conjure out of a ball of yarn, and I had seen sweaters like this on eBay and Etsy, but passed because it didn’t feel “me”. In person, I was intrigued by how beautifully made this jumper was. There was no label but I was quite certain it was wool—it had that faint but unmistakable wool smell³—and my guess is that it was handmade. It was priced at A$95, but the shop staff said I could have it for A$75.

I tried it on, and well, it wasn’t an encouraging sight. The pattern was pretty but it was also quite busy, and it looked terrible with the trousers I happened to be wearing. The sleeves were too short, even though the rest of the jumper fit well in the shoulders and body.

But I loved it. I love it for completely different reasons from why I love the Babaà jumper—less for its style, and more for its tactile qualities. Quality-wise, this is actually what I wished my Babaà jumper felt like (a thicker yarn but still tightly knit, a little heavier). It’s more structured because of its denser weight and the roll-neck has an almost sculpted quality. It’s not destined for staple status—unlike the Babaà sweater, it’s not a style I can throw over everything—but it has its own personality, and there’s a timelessness about it; it could have been made in the 1970s, it could have been made yesterday.

I had thought the jumper wasn’t my style, but seeing it person, I realised it is simply, a different side of “me”—the part of me that has a soft spot for craft and the labour it entails, symbols and patterns that tell a story. It is a part of me that doesn’t express itself in style adjectives, but I could see how it fit into my life nonetheless.

And this for me really sums up what shopping is in this day and age. Online, we shop with one sense—our sense of sight. We learn to be more curatorial—we become familiar with a particular style or designer, and we learn to filter the internet to mine the hard-to-find gems. But our eyes can only tell us so much, and our brain fills in the rest with our dreams, insecurities and other impulses. We school ourselves to become savvier shoppers, but ultimately, but we’re driven by image.

Shopping in person comes with a sense of openness, discovery, not to mention a certainty I never feel when I shop online. I’m not only shopping to fulfil a mental image of my style; I buy things that speak to me in other ways—and it has nothing to do with a moodboard, or CPW or all the other things I’m supposed to think about before I buy something. And that’s a very beautiful thing to have when we often feel so tethered to the virtual world, attached to all the things we can see but cannot touch.

I don’t think there is only one right way to shop (shopping in person can be really bad for impulsive shoppers!), but I think it is important to not let online shopping—and more importantly, its attendant trends—take over your world. We’re all vulnerable to what the internet has to say about stuff, and I’m finding that too much of it can mean we risk losing the ability to enjoy things for what they are.

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Ending off on a bit of shopping housekeeping: this jumper marks my first purchase since end-December (that’s when I bought the Babaà jumper) and the end of my no-buy January. I didn’t find a no-buy January hard, but February is a whole other story—I’ve felt my interest wane in about 90% of the things that caught my eye but the remaining 10% are stubbornly clinging on my consciousness.

This jumper is secondhand, so technically, I still have some wriggle room with my five-item shopping goal (the limit was five new items), but for now I’m treating it as my second buy of 2024, which means I can only buy three more things for the year, eep!

And that’s it! Happy Lunar New Year 🐉 to anyone here who celebrates the holiday. I’m currently in Singapore for a month, spending time with my family and eating my weight in Lunar New Year snacks and my favourite dishes from home, and enjoying the tropical humidity. Will share more in my February round-up.

1. There is so much more to write about buying secondhand jumpers, but I could not get it all into one post. Maybe about that another day.

2. I felt this way in the past when I bought a secondhand Chanel bag. And when I bought my Cèline Trio. I am very susceptible to status symbols!

3. After I bought it I went home and did the burn test on a loose thread and it passed with flying colours. It smelt exactly like burnt hair, and then it crumbled in an ashy way that acrylic and other synthetic fibres do not.