History of the Ugly Christmas Sweater

Picture this: you open an invitation to an ugly Christmas Sweater party. Your first thought might be “where can I buy one” or, if you’re creative, “how can I make one?” If you are a huge textile nerd like we are here at Tatter, you might also wonder at the origin of the Ugly Christmas sweater.

The truth is that the meaning of Christmas varies as much as the textiles associated with it. In 2021, we wrote about the history of the Christmas stocking. There’s the Santa hat, the tree skirt, the felt wreath– the list goes on and on. While digging through the Tatter archive for inspiration, we came across patterns for a rising symbol of the season: the ugly Christmas sweater. So snuggle in, have a cup of cocoa, and let us tell you the story of the ugly Christmas sweater.

The Ugly Christmas sweater might feel like a holiday classic, but the truth is that they really only trace back to the mid 20th century. The act of knitting itself is a relatively modern invention, dating back to roughly the 7th to 9th centuries in the Arab world. If that feels like a long time ago to you, consider that weaving is at least 12,000 years old and  knitting has only been around for a little over 1,000.  Early Islamic knitting was very fine, with tight and tiny stitches. Knitted garments from this time featured intricate color work designs with Islamic motifs and Arabic lettering in blue and white fiber.

The practice of knitting spread along trade routes through the mediterranean and quickly gained popularity in Southern Europe, overtaking the earlier practice of “needle binding” which utilized a single needle to create a stitch (somewhat similar to crochet). Knitting guilds emerged in France as early as 1268 and spread throughout Europe by the 18th century. But the elaborate, color work,  knitted sweater that precedes the Ugly Christmas sweater is the Norwegian lusekofte (lice pattern) which emerged in the mid 19th century. Originally knit in black and white, the lusekofte emerged around the same time as the multi-colored, Shetland fair isle sweater. By the early 20th century, most black and white sweaters also included red or replaced black with red.

Beginning in the 1930s, Norwegian style sweaters and knitting patterns rose in popularity as fashionable ski attire. Marketed as “Snow Time Sweaters” or “Ski Time Sweaters”, the stag, tree, and star motifs made them easily marketable as Christmas sweaters and by the 1950s they became known as “jingle bell sweaters”. By the 70s, Jingle Bell Sweaters were seen as more of a joke than an earnest fashion statement: in 1976, Candice Bergen hosted the second ever SNL Christmas special with the whole cast dressed in silly but still beautiful Nordic style sweaters.

By the late 90s and early 2000s, the phenomenon had shifted much more towards the purposefully garish: in the 2001 romantic Comedy Bridget Jones’ Diary, Colin Firth’s character Mark Darcy first appears onscreen wearing a distinctly unattractive knit reindeer sweater. While this sweater had none of the charm and repeated motifs of its Scandinavian predecessors, the ‘ugliness’ was part of the fun.