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Read moreA mohair family in the Eastern Cape.
In 1967 Jan Paul and Elsa Barnard started a mohair business on a farm in the mountains of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. He built it from hand looms. She had trained as a fashion designer in Germany, and designed the collections. What they made came off Angora goats kept on the land around them: yarn, handwoven carpets, blankets, knitwear.
Their three daughters each took a different part of it forward. The eldest, Katrina, runs SundayChild, the handwoven carpet and blanket side her mother led until 2022. The youngest, Louise, runs Barnard Mohair, the blanket and clothing business their father built. Jan Paul died in 2024. Elsa still advises on the making.
The Fibre Set is the third thread. Not a mill this time, but the same question the family has been answering since 1967: what is this actually made of, and will it wear.
Anita Barnard
The middle of the three sisters, raised in the family's natural-fibre business. She spent her career on the other side of the industry, in the part that decides how clothing gets talked about: she built €2.5m of brand-funded content partnerships for adidas and Ralph Lauren, then led Red Bull's content-partnerships portfolio, worth €12m a year.
Which is a useful thing to have done before starting this. Knowing exactly how a garment is made to sound natural is what makes reading the label properly worth doing.
Family history as published by SundayChild and Barnard Mohair.
About the mark
The ribbon at the top of every page is the family's own, drawn in the 1960s. It is reproduced here as an exact vector trace of the original artwork rather than a redrawing, so the loop, the crossing and the cut ends are the ones that were drawn then.