"P.S." concludes fashion journalist Lucia van der Post in a recent gripping instalment of the Weekend Financial Times series on How to Spend It: "Where are the fashion set buying their sweaters?"

From a self-styled "knitologist" and "surfie" John MacArthur, who lives at Bondi Beach and knits away in his back room when not surfing. He'll make any shape, any colour, any size. His cardigans are snapped up almost before he's put the needles away. A la Mode has a few at £195 each.

I haven't seen these cardigans and shouldn't really comment, but I find it difficult to believe that this on its own will be the answer to current slackness in the knitwear sector, manufacturing and retail.

And even if self-styled knitologist J MacArthur gave up surfing altogether, only two or three more bales will be absorbed.

Nor can normal folk with normal incomes, away from London's more exotic fashion shops, see pricing at £195 a cardigan as helpful to success, except for the exotic shops and self-styled knitologist and surfie J MacArthur of Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia.

And yet one can be so wrong when it comes to dismissing fashion, like wool market analysis, with a sneer.

It only needs some fool footballer or television personality to set the ball rolling, so to speak, by wearing a knitted cardigan, for mass production and more reliable pricing to follow, and thus turn the balance from slump to boom.

You may, as I do, still find such a reversal difficult to envisage.

But perhaps we could nevertheless all make our own individual efforts to dress a bit better, with the emphasis on wool. We could also mumble disgruntedly when others, who clearly have the money to do otherwise, are slack and cheap when it comes to the way they dress.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.