Sonia Rykiel

Sonia Rykiel opened her own Paris boutique in 1968 but it's through this decade that her particular approach to knitwear - closely fitted sweater dresses and separates, often in bold horizontal stripes, deliberately left unlined with raw or exposed seams rather than hidden inside a finished interior - becomes a genuine signature rather than a boutique curiosity. That choice to leave construction visible was a real departure from conventional garment finishing, which almost universally treats an unfinished seam as a flaw to be hidden rather than a design decision worth showing off.

Her knitwear fit naturally alongside the decade's broader move toward separates and mix-and-match construction - a Rykiel sweater, cardigan, and skirt were built to coordinate and layer with each other rather than function only as a single fixed outfit, which suited exactly the kind of flexible, multi-purpose wardrobe a growing number of working women were looking for through this decade. Unlike heavier tailored separates aimed at office wear specifically, though, her pieces stayed close to the body and comfortable enough for genuinely casual, all-day wear, closer in spirit to loungewear elevated to real fashion status than to conventional daywear tailoring.

I think Rykiel's real contribution is proving that knitwear - historically treated as a comfortable but somewhat minor wardrobe category, secondary to woven tailoring - could carry an entire, instantly recognizable designer identity on its own terms. Her bold stripes and visible seaming turned what could have read as simply "sweaters" into a genuinely distinct point of view, and that idea, treating knitwear as serious design territory in its own right rather than as tailoring's more casual cousin, outlasted this decade by a considerable margin.