Founder & Creative Director at Brooklyn Tweed

Jared Flood is an American knitwear designer, photographer, and founder of the design house and yarn manufacturer Brooklyn Tweed. His work is inspired by historical hand-knitting traditions of the British Isles and Scandinavia but imagined for contemporary urban life. Flood has aligned himself with the local purchasing movement, committing his yarn company to sourcing and milling all its wool in the United States. Jared Flood moved to Brooklyn, NY to attend the Master of Fine Arts program at the New York Academy of Art in 2005. Although his education was in two-dimensional art, particularly photography, painting, and drawing, he became increasingly interested in the beauty and utility of knitting design, viewing knitwear as art with a function. He began Brooklyn Tweed as a website and knitting blog, quickly acquiring a following for his photography of knitted objects and his modern designs for men. A paucity of high quality, fashionable knitwear patterns for men sparked an interest in creating his own garments. In 2007 he published his first designs and instructional articles in Interweave Knits and Vogue Knitting, and in 2009 he released his first knitwear collection, Made in Brooklyn, in collaboration with Classic Elite Yarns. He completed his MFA the same year with a thesis on ekphrasis theory, then turned his attention to developing his own brand of yarn and supporting it with design collections. Brooklyn Tweed released Shelter, a worsted-weight wool yarn grown by Targhee-Columbia sheep in Wyoming and milled in Harrisville, New Hampshire in 2010. The following year the company offered a lighter, fingering-weight version called Loft. Flood collaborated with several other designers to release pattern collections for hand knitting; since 2011 Brooklyn Tweed has published three seasonal collections by house designers each year as well as biannual collections of patterns by guest designers. Flood is a prominent figure among a new generation of independent knitwear designers who have successfully used digital publishing, online distribution, and social media to form a direct relationship with customers, circumventing reliance on traditional print media and large publishing houses to disseminate their work. His philosophy of garment design and construction is influenced by the work of Elizabeth Zimmermann, and he draws inspiration from Japanese textile, architectural, and interior design; urban street fashion; and traditional hand-knitting from northern Europe. Flood says that texture is his medium and that the experience of the hand-knitter must be an essential element of each design.