The curious case of Grace Kelly's Aran sweater

Author’s Note: Occasionally, I might break from the planned usual format—although is the format so set in stone yet after a single issue?—to do a one-off post. In this case, I’m adapting a lengthy Twitter thread I posted last year that detailed a particularly nerdy aspect of a feature I’d recently written. My tweets eventually auto-delete, so this is my attempt to preserve that thread before it disappears into the ether. And because of the length, you might need to view this on the site to read the entire thing.

Think of that thread as a first draft. I hope you find some amusement, and we should return to the usual array of knits and flicks soon enough.

I’m someone who can easily fall down rabbit holes when researching pieces (case in point), which can be both a blessing and a curse. So naturally, my long-form feature about Aran sweaters in the wake of House of Gucci’s addition to the Movie Sweater canon was no exception. It gave me plenty of threads to explore: Many, many things have been written about Aran sweaters over the years—especially in the post-Knives Out era—so there were a lot of articles, listicles, and SEO-friendly pieces detailing the history of Aran sweaters; they often included a list of the most famous examples.

Beyond the standards, one sweater largely divorced from the movies kept showing up. It was an Aran sweater worn by Grace Kelly, who starred in several iconic movies, won an Oscar, and became literal royalty after she married the Prince of Monaco. (If you’re interested in learning more about Kelly’s life, the You Must Remember This episode on Kelly is well worth the listen.)

The photo showed Kelly lounging on a boat in a white Aran turtleneck, sunglasses, white capris, white socks, and Converse-esque sneakers with a luxurious city in the background. But it wasn’t the scene, or the sweater itself, that fascinated me: It was the fact that everyone from news sites to Irish knitwear shops targeting (most likely American) tourists alike used the same exact Grace Kelly photo. They more or less had the same crop, the same featured angles, the same streaks that might suggest the photo was scanned, and the same warm-tinted discoloration.

The photo wasn’t a snapshot from any of the films she made in her all-too-brief career. But nobody seemed to agree on when the photo was taken or the context. In most instances where I saw a date attached to the photo, it was kept vague to a decade like the ‘50s; some places also credited the photo as appearing in Vogue. I decided to fact-check it: If several places claimed that this photo of Grace Kelly appeared in Vogue, wouldn’t it be cool if I could find the issue at hand? Plus, I was curious about what publications might’ve said about Kelly back then and how it might’ve led to the growing popularity of Aran sweaters.

It turns out that the New York Public Library has more than 100 years’ worth of digital archives (newspapers, magazines, etc.) that anyone with an NYPL library card can access, and Vogue just happened to be one of the magazines whose vast archives are searchable.

I figured it wouldn’t be that difficult to find it, right? Lol nope. I typed just about every iteration I could think of into the advanced search engine. I focused on Kelly, on the sweater, on the boat, and on the locations of Monaco and Monte Carlo in case the photos were from after she married. You name it, I probably popped it into the search bar. I looked beyond the ‘50s and expanded the search beyond Vogue. One cover featured a different sweater. Plenty of photoshoots and unrelated articles came up.

A January 1965 issue of Good Housekeeping, which featured a photograph of Kelly in that sweater, proved to be a rare exception, but it showed Kelly from a different angle. “Some of Princess Grace’s happiest moments are spent sailing (above) in Monaco’s colorful harbor,” a caption on the bottom half of the page (which you can see in full here) read. If nothing else, it placed the image as having been taken when she was a royal.

When I wasn’t digging through the library archives, I started tinkering around at home. I installed a Chrome extension to get around Pinterest's chokehold on Google Images. I discovered Grace Kelly Tumblr and photographs of Kelly wearing the sweater (but not on the boat) during a highly photographed 1962 family trip to Gstaad, a resort town for the wealthy in Switzerland. Those photos even show up on Getty and Alamy.

Side note: Did you know that at one point last year, you could’ve purchased small prints of those photos at Walmart?

Eventually, I found a larger version of the photo from Good Housekeeping, which was credited to Howell Conant, a photographer who became known for many of his Kelly portraits starting in 1955 up until she died in 1982; he died in 1999. I went back to the search engines, and more pages came up, but in some cases, I could only view the summaries of what was on the page. For instance, I knew that a tribute issue of Town & Country from 2007 contained a photo captioned “at the tiller of her sailboat, 1962,” but because its parent company limited what you could view online, I didn’t know what the photo looked like. I also found a photo of a two-page spread in a coffee table book by Conant (Grace, published in 1992).

By this point, I had a pretty good idea that almost none of this would end up in the actual article, but I was committed to following this to its natural end, dammit. The Town & Country issue was fairly cheap on eBay, so I bought it. The coffee table book was much more expensive, so I returned to the library to view a copy. Both the page and the chapter the photo shows up in (“Happy Moments of a Happy Family”) date the photo to royal life.

A few days later, the Town & Country issue arrived, only for it to reveal that it wasn’t the photo I was looking for. (Also, the photo was in black and white.)

I also discovered that the photo shows up in the 2007 Life magazine-affiliated book Remembering Grace (part of its Great Photographers Series) in a four-photo, two-page spread; I bought that book, too. A special People magazine issue about the royals from 2010 had the photograph, but it was spread over two pages. Also, it was kinda expensive, even on eBay, so photos on Tumblr sufficed in that case.

To further drive home that the sailboat photo came from her post-Hollywood life. In Remembering Grace, the following passage is included two pages before the sailboat photo:

The Remembering Grace inclusion was the earliest iteration of the Aran sweater photo that didn’t involve the photo being split into two like it is in Grace. And while you could explain some of the markings on the original yellowed photograph through the scan, I was still uncertain about how or where that version of the photo came from.

That tale is fairly short and inconclusive. Google searching the image once again brought me to the earliest usage from at least four different Blogger posts from May 2011. Each post used the slug “sailing-away” and featured photos of famous people in boats. (One, two, three, four.) And all four posts had the same selection of photos and text down to the “Jackie Jennedy” typo. The posts don’t name the author, and I’m not sure why there are several blogs with identical posts on them, either.

I figured I couldn’t pick this apart any further, but I was content with my attempt to unravel some (most likely unintentional) sweater misinformation. In short, although Kelly is among those who played a role in making Aran sweaters popular, the photo 1) Was taken in 1962; 2) Well after she became royalty; and 3) Probably didn’t appear in Vogue. Also, high-quality versions of the Kelly photo look so much better than the warped ones all over Google.

What did that all add up to in the feature? A single paragraph (emphasis mine):

Journalism!

What I’m Reading

• Book Lovers by Emily Henry: When I first read the prologue, I’m pretty sure I uttered “Fuckkkkkkkkk” to myself because I loved the premise—the heroine is the career-focused “other woman” who always gets dumped by her boyfriend/fiancé in romances/rom-coms so he can go back to his hometown to get back with his ex or to go the small-town he only recently visited and date the charming local girl he fell for after getting stuck there far longer than he planned to stay—so so much. It both gently pokes fun at Hallmark-esque movie tropes and lovingly embraces them, and you know what, the so-called “Ice Queen” deserves that HEA, too!

• She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey: I love a good journalism process story—it’s why movies like All the President’s Men, Spotlight, and even Shattered Glass are so good—and that notion is at the core of Kantor and Twohey’s book on their Harvey Weinstein reporting and what came after. A film adaptation is coming out in November, so I’ll be very curious to see how this particular story comes alive on the big screen.

Shameless Plugs

• I reviewed the up-and-coming series House of the Dragon, which I liked a lot. I dunno, I think these guys might have a future in TV or something.

• If you mostly know me because of my knitwear writing, I used to write thousands of words about Game of Thrones for several weeks at a time in another life. It’s been absurdly easy to do the same thing for HOTD—pronounced as the George R.R. Martin-endorsed “HOT D”—so far. Including the fact that HOTD used the same exact theme music as GOT.

• If it weren’t apparent enough, Geekmageddon² is upon us, and on top of my HOTD duties, I am also recapping She-Hulk this season. I’m enjoying it so far, but I think it’s more because it means Tatiana Maslany is back on my TV screen again than for the MCU of it all. (This is your semi-regular reminder that you need to watch Orphan Black.)

• For my other newsletter, I attempted to wax some poetics on the near-perfect, cathartic end of Better Call Saul.

Knitwear of the Week

Knit: A twisted cable turtleneck sweater (Disclaimer: I’m terrible at trying to figure out what colors are what in black and white movies, so I’m assuming it’s white or a natural wool color; maybe a light gray.)

Worn By: Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey), who paired it with a kilt (*swoons*) and a sporran (and sometimes a jacket), in I Know Where I’m Going!

I had never heard of I Know Where I’m Going! until the Film Foundation—Martin Scorsese’s nonprofit “dedicated to protecting and preserving motion picture history”—launched a virtual screening room earlier this year where it hosts monthly free screenings of restored films. I caught the Foundation’s first virtual screening, which was this 1945 romance from Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell, back in May. Which is also about how long I’ve had these screengrabs saved on my desktop. (The 4K restoration is streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

I Know Where I’m Going! follows Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), a 25-year-old English woman who’s traveling to a Scottish island to marry a wealthy and much older man. As she waits out inclement weather on the Isle of Mull, she meets Torquil MacNeil (Livesey), a naval officer—and a laird—with whom Joan butts heads. The yearning between them is palpable.

Later in the film, Torquil arrives in the scene in a sweater and kilt, which he doesn’t try to change out of when an impatient Joan runs off into a storm. It’s an ideal look: That sweater is fitting for unpredictable western Scotland weather—and the kilt turns him into a romantic hero, especially when he rushes out to rescue Joan from getting caught in a whirlpool. Joan, that other guy never stood a chance.

I might not always include multiple photos for the KotW, but come on. I can’t mention a kilt and then not show it to y’all.

I am, after all, only human.

1  I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here, but libraries are so so so great.

2  Geekmageddon, meaning the arrival of no fewer than five different geek-centric TV shows to our screens in about the span of seven weeks, all but one which are weekly releases: The Sandman (Netflix, Aug. 5), She-Hulk (Disney+, Aug. 18), House of the Dragon (HBO Max, Aug. 21), The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Amazon Prime Video, Sept. 2), and Andor (Disney+, Sept. 21).