Trend forecasting for menswear knitwear is usually written from a mood board. This one is written from a factory. The directions below are the AW26 and SS27 calls we are seeing land in development requests across our menswear customers — what they are asking us to sample, what they are reordering at scale, and what we are advising them to book early. Each section pairs the trend with what it actually means in yarn, gauge, lead time and cost. If you are a merchandiser building an AW26 buy or an SS27 capsule, treat this as a sourcing briefing rather than a styling article.
Two macro shifts shape the next 18 months of knitwear development. The first is that buyers are no longer chasing the post-pandemic comfort silhouette in its rawest form — the boxy, oversized, low-gauge shape is being refined into something more tailored, more wearable in a hybrid office-casual wardrobe, and more sellable beyond the streetwear-adjacent customer. The second is that the heritage and workwear vocabulary that drove menswear from 2023 onward has not peaked. Cable, fisherman, shetland, shawl collar and brushed surfaces are continuing into AW26 and stretching, in lighter weights, into SS27.
For a merchandiser, the practical takeaway is that core knitwear is doing more of the work in your assortment. The trend pieces are still important, but they are being asked to sit beside genuinely classic shapes that customers buy without thinking. That means your buy needs to be split more carefully — and the production calendar for each split is different. Chunky heritage pieces need yarn booked early. Brushed and bouclé textures need finishing capacity reserved. Polo knit needs a tighter SS27 calendar than wool buyers are used to. We go through each of these below.
The single strongest direction for AW26 is the return of properly heavy heritage knitwear. Cable, aran, fisherman and shetland-style sweaters were back in the conversation in 2024 and 2025, but often as 7GG or 12GG translations — visually heritage, but lightweight, and built for a customer who wanted the look without the bulk. For AW26 the heavy versions are returning to the buy.
That means real chunky construction, typically in the 3GG to 5GG range, on wool or wool-blend yarn with enough body to hold a cable. The cream and oatmeal fisherman shape is the anchor, but we are seeing denim-blue allover cable and dark-brown cable turtleneck variants land alongside the classic ivory. From a production standpoint, this trend has the longest lead time of anything in your AW26 buy. Chunky yarn in cream and natural tones gets booked out at mills first; if you wait until the season is half-confirmed, you will be paying a premium and competing with everyone else for the same dye lots. We recommend confirming yarn for chunky heritage programs at least four to six weeks before you would for a 12GG basic.
Brushed Surfaces, Mohair And Bouclé Texture
Texture is the second big direction, and it sits on the cusp between AW26 and SS27. Brushed surfaces — particularly mohair and mohair-blend — are continuing strong for AW26, with grunge-leaning monochrome stripes, abstract patterns and even animal motifs all running in brushed yarn. For SS27, we are seeing the same texture interest translate into bouclé and popcorn textures in cotton and cotton blends, which read tactile without overheating the wearer.
The sourcing reality on textured knit is that finishing matters as much as yarn. A brushed mohair sweater is a wool-blend body knit at a controlled gauge and then mechanically brushed — the brushing is a separate operation, with its own capacity constraints and its own quality risks (uneven nap, pilling, shedding in the early washes). Bouclé and popcorn are knit structures, not finishes, but they require careful tension and a knitter who has run the structure before. For both, we strongly recommend a salesman sample before bulk so the texture density and hand-feel are signed off in writing. If you are sourcing these textures for the first time, our brushed and mohair knitwear development guide walks through the production controls in more depth.
The earth-tone palette that has dominated menswear knitwear since 2024 is not done. Camel, oatmeal, cream, taupe, olive, dark brown and rust will all carry strong into AW26. What is changing is that buyers are layering a stronger red into the same palette — not the orange-leaning rust of 2025, but a deeper, more pigmented red. Maroon, burgundy, brick and grunge-leaning red argyle pieces are appearing in development requests.
For SS27, the earth-tone base softens into lighter naturals — periwinkle, washed denim blue, pale oatmeal and sun-bleached cream — with the red carrying through as an accent rather than a hero. The sourcing implication here is dye-lot management. Earth tones are notoriously hard to match across reorders because they sit in the part of the color space where small dye-batch variance reads as obvious shade difference under store lighting. If you are reordering camel or oatmeal across drops, lock the lab dip and Pantone reference at the start of the season and hold a master shade card. Our color approval guide covers how to spec this so bulk does not drift.
The oversized silhouette that drove menswear knitwear from 2022 to 2025 is not going away — but it is being tailored down. For AW26 and SS27, the shape we are sampling most is what merchandisers internally call a "refined relaxed" fit: still a touch wider than slim, still long enough in the body to layer, but with proportions corrected so the shoulder sits closer to the natural line, the sleeve is more controlled, and the body length is anchored rather than dropped.
This fit shift matters more than it sounds. A genuinely oversized sweater can be cut from a relatively simple block; a refined relaxed fit requires more careful grading because the proportions only work in a narrow tolerance band. If your tech pack still carries the 2023 oversized block, expect your AW26 samples to come back looking dated. We are advising menswear customers to re-grade their core blocks for AW26 and treat fit revision as part of the season's development cost. For background on how grading actually works across an international size range, see our sweater sizing and fit grading guide.
Two product categories are taking visible share in AW26 and SS27 buys. The first is the chunky shawl-collar cardigan — a heritage shape that menswear keeps rediscovering, and which is back as a hero piece in many AW26 development requests. The second is the knit polo, which is moving from a niche SS sub-category into a full SS27 anchor.
The shawl-collar cardigan is a production piece that rewards an experienced factory. The collar needs to hold its shape over time, the button band has to sit flat without bunching, and on chunky gauges the seam construction at the shoulder is critical or the cardigan looks heavy and ill-finished. The knit polo, by contrast, is a fine-gauge piece — typically 12GG or finer — where placket construction, collar shape and yarn selection determine whether the customer perceives it as premium or as a polo shirt in knit form. SS27 polo development should start in late AW26 to leave room for placket and collar revisions.
The table below summarises the production reality behind each direction. Lead times shown are indicative for a typical 500-1,000 piece order at our facility (sample 7-25 days, bulk 30-45 days from approved PP sample); your own number will vary with complexity and yarn availability.
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| Heritage cable / fisherman | 3GG-5GG | Wool, wool-blend, natural shades | High — book 4-6 weeks early | Yarn allocation, cable consistency |
| Brushed / mohair texture | 7GG-12GG | Mohair, mohair-blend | Medium — confirm brushing capacity | Nap evenness, shedding |
| Bouclé / popcorn (SS27) | 7GG-12GG | Cotton, cotton-blend | Medium — texture-experienced knitter | Tension control, hand feel |
| Earth tones + accent red | All gauges | Standard yarn books | Low — but lock lab dips early | Dye-lot drift across reorders |
| Refined relaxed fit | All gauges | Standard | None (block work, not yarn) |
The planning takeaway for AW26 and SS27 is that booking order matters as much as trend selection. The pieces most exposed to late booking are the chunky heritage sweaters and shawl-collar cardigans, where yarn allocation and 3GG-5GG knitting capacity tighten first. Book these as soon as your fit block is confirmed.
Mid-priority booking covers brushed mohair, bouclé textures and SS27 knit polos. These need a finishing or knitting capability that not every factory carries, and reserving that capacity early protects your sample-to-bulk timeline. Finer-gauge 7GG to 12GG basics in standard yarn books — earth-tone crew necks, mock necks and refined-fit pullovers — can be booked later in the cycle without much penalty, which gives you flexibility to react if a trend piece in your range underperforms in pre-line.
For a complete view of how a season actually moves through development and production, our seasonal knitwear planning guide walks through the calendar in detail. And if you are pressure-testing your supplier mix for the new season, our vetting checklist covers the questions worth asking before you commit a trend-heavy buy to one mill.
None of the directions above are surprising in isolation. What is changing is that the production realities behind each — yarn allocation, finishing capacity, gauge availability, grading work — are tightening at the same time. Buyers who treat AW26 and SS27 as a single planning window, who book chunky and textured pieces early, and who hold flexibility on finer-gauge basics will be the ones whose capsules ship on time. The trends will reward the merchandisers who plan the production calendar around them, not the other way around.
