# Pauline Dujancourt's Knitwear Laboratory: Bridging Lima and London Through Texture
Pauline Dujancourt has transformed knitwear from a functional craft into a vehicle for emotional connection and community building. The designer, recently honored as the 2026 ANDAM Special Prize winner, operates across two continents, channeling textile traditions from Lima, Peru through her London-based studio to create pieces that function as dialogue between artisans and wearers alike.
The ANDAM Prize, one of Europe's most prestigious fashion awards, recognizes emerging design talent with bold vision and commercial potential. Dujancourt's win arrives at a pivotal moment in contemporary fashion, where consumers increasingly seek transparency in production and meaningful narratives behind garments. Her approach positions knitwear as more than surface aesthetics. Instead, she constructs each piece as a repository of skill exchange and cultural knowledge transfer.
Working with knitters in Lima grounds Dujancourt's practice in real human relationships rather than abstracted supply chains. Lima remains a major knitting hub in South America, home to generations of artisans specializing in complex pattern work, hand-finishing, and innovative textile engineering. Dujancourt channels this expertise into her London collections, creating a two-way conversation where Peruvian craft traditions directly shape her design language.
The designer's method reverses typical fashion hierarchies. Rather than exporting designs to manufacturers who execute instructions, Dujancourt collaborates with her Lima knitters as creative partners. Their technical knowledge and intuitive understanding of yarn behavior inform her designs from inception. This collaborative approach explains why her work reads as authentic rather than appropriative—the garments emerge from genuine partnership, not extraction.
Knitwear itself has experienced renaissance in high fashion over the past five years. Labels like JW Anderson, Gabriela Hearst, and Loewe have elevated knitwear from basics to statement pieces, experimenting with texture, color graduation, and sculptural silhouettes. Dujancourt's entry into this conversation brings specificity through her Lima connection and her focus on emotional communication through yarn selection and stitch detail.
The ANDAM recognition carries financial support and industry acceleration. It signals to retailers and press that Dujancourt's vision deserves institutional backing, opening doors to larger production capacity while she navigates the delicate balance between scaling and maintaining artisanal integrity. This tension defines her practice: how to grow without sacrificing the human relationships that make her work distinct.
Her emphasis on learning—both teaching her Lima collaborators new techniques and learning from their generational knowledge—reflects a maturity rare in emerging designers. Rather than positioning herself as sole author, Dujancourt acknowledges the collective intelligence required to make clothing. This philosophy extends to wearers, who purchase knitwear understanding they own a piece of a larger ecosystem.
The prize positions Dujancourt within a broader industry shift toward designers who embed social and cultural practice into their work. As luxury fashion confronts questions about overproduction and disconnection from craft heritage, figures like Dujancourt offer an alternative model: slower, more intentional, rooted in specific places and people.
Her London studio and Lima workshop now operate as a single extended creative space. This geography matters. It prevents the abstraction that flattens most global fashion production into faceless efficiency. Instead, Dujancourt has built infrastructure for genuine exchange—a knitwear practice where skill, love, and learning move in both directions across continents.