Sölvi Berg
I inherited an argument I never signed, and I have spent a decade refusing to put it down.
Sölvi Berg · in conversation, 2026Sölvi Berg runs the house that reads, to the trade, like a continuation of Ingeborg Sten. She would rather you called it an inheritance than a homage, and she can tell you exactly what she inherited.
The greys her house shows as its most complete work are, she is the first to say, not hers first. Berg directs knitwear the way the Materials desk reads it: from the undyed fleece forward, colour reported from the fibre and never chosen from a book, small runs she can still name the hands behind.
She took the practice up in her early thirties, in a rented room with a single loom, which is a sentence she is aware sounds borrowed. It is borrowed. The difference, she says, is that Sten was arguing with her trade and Berg is arguing with a market that has since learned to sell the argument back.
Four decisions she kept, on purpose
What a living director chose to carry forward from a maker she never met, each one read from the work and then made again by hand.
She kept the dye-house cold
The founding no, inherited whole: wool that arrives with a colour keeps it. Berg treats dye as a cost she declines to charge the wearer, and everything downstream — the greys, the price, the small runs — answers to that first refusal, exactly as it did fifty years ago.
She leaves the seam showing
The hand-turned edge the trade now reads as her signature is, she insists, a quotation. A cuff, a hem, left visible and drawn as a line. Hiding the join, she says after Sten, is a small lie, and the small lies are the ones that add up.
She grades colour by the animal
Colour is reported, not chosen: sorted by hand at the fleece, by the animal that grew it, long before the loom. There is no swatch because there is nothing to match. Berg buys by the fleece and keeps the notebook, the same as the maker before her.
She keeps it small enough to name
She makes what a room can honestly make and no more, and she can name the hands that made it. Scarcity, for Berg as for Sten, was never the pitch; it is the arithmetic of doing the slow thing properly. The market sells it. She only ever meant it as honesty.
The argument found a second maker
Sten stopped explaining herself in 1971. Berg spent a decade proving the argument could be made again, in a living room with a single loom.
You can read her back from Sten and forward from here. The method is the same because the reasons are the same: colour reported from the fibre, the edge left honest, the run kept small enough to sign. What looks to the trade like a house style is, in the long view, an inheritance made by hand a second time.
She is careful not to claim it as invention, and careful not to let it be read as costume. The work carries the argument, she says, better than she can — which is, word for word, what the maker before her said, and precisely why the inheritance took.
| Words | Ivo Halloran |
| Portrait | Studio Nord |
| Knitwear | Berg, undyed corriedale |
| Note | Sölvi Berg spoke to MARLGREY on the record. The inheritance from Ingeborg Sten is her own account. |