Royal and ancient: What happened when a group of young fashionistas got their hands on Pringle's archive of knitwear designs

THE Borders, with their long-running rag trade connections, are used to dealing with the wilder shores of fashion. The challenges of combining fine gauge intarsia with tea plate-sized paillettes. Christopher Kane pitching up at the factory to discuss the finer points of cashmere biker jacket manufacture. That kind of thing. But it is all about the future. The pace of fashion, and its obsession with the wow and the now, means the past gets forgotten.

So when Alistair O'Neill, a senior research fellow at Central St Martins College of Art and Design in London, arrived at Pringle's Hawick headquarters last August, tasked with putting the company's archive in order, what did he find? "Boxes of stuff. A lot of it had been damaged in a flood at the factory ten years ago. There were remnants, and a few things that someone had thought, 'This might be interesting.' It was all in a room at the back of the building that nobody visits.

"Most fashion companies are only now beginning to understand the importance of an archive to objectify their own history. The industry moves at such a pace that lots of companies don't have the time, resources or money to preserve anything."

Pringle's almost-200-year story is the history of knitwear, of the Scottish textiles industry, of women's changing role in society. All far too good to hide in a cupboard. The company was founded in 1815 by Robert Pringle to manufacture woollen hosiery and underwear. It was an early adopter of cashmere in the 1870s and was at the forefront of transforming knitted garments from under to outerwear. Leaving socks and pants far behind, Pringle popularised the twinset, was one of the first to recognise the value of celebrity endorsement and launched a thousand ill-advised pastel golf sweaters for men.

One year on and O'Neill has discovered gaps in Pringle's annals, mainly that there is almost nothing from the first 100 years. "People did not keep their underwear for posterity. They repaired it, they looked after it but it was not handed down. Also, the company didn't brand their products until the 20th century. Examples from the early period exist, and we're pretty sure they were made in the Borders, but we are still searching."

Whether on eBay or lovingly stored in an attic, O'Neill and his students have found riches out there. For a start, many of the talented individuals who worked at Pringle during its glory years of manufacturing are still alive. When O'Neill organised a 'day of record' – think Antiques Roadshow for cardigans – in Hawick last summer, designers, machinists, fit models and collectors turned up with an astonishing range of clothing, ephemera and memories.

When Wallace Shaw, who worked at Pringle from 1960 to 1978, joined the company, no Scottish art colleges offered fashion as a degree subject. He graduated in interiors and furniture design from Glasgow School of Art and was whirled straight from his home in the city's east end to the factory in Hawick. "I spent the first year and a half doing the rounds of every department, doing my technical training. By the end of it I knew how to sew the buttons on, how to operate the huge knitting machines, everything".

It was the best of times to be working in British fashion. The company had a royal warrant and Prince Charles and Princess Anne were photographed in cashmere jumpers with a corgi. But for the first time, teenagers and scenesters were also wearing the brand. "We were at the top of the tree, we were involved in the London scene, Carnaby Street was happening, we were creating a young Pringle."

Technical innovations and new materials were throwing the market wide open. "My colleague Lesley Rankin invented new techniques of screenprinting and hand painting on knitwear. For the first time, younger people had an income to buy their own clothes. For them, we worked in lambswool or Shetland wool. It was cheaper than cashmere and allowed us to do much wilder stuff."

In the spirit of the times, Shaw was given carte blanche to go postal with the four-ply. Before Pringle launched its first menswear collection, the manly colour palette had been grey, natural, black, navy and that's it. "For the first season," he recalls, "it was all pale lilac, mint green and pink."

For a fashion show at the Savoy, he tasked the firm's hand-knitters with producing a floor-length, Argyll- patterned coat. He sent men down the catwalk in lurex sweaters while Marc Jacobs was still in nappies. A woolly kaftan occupies a particularly fond spot in his memory. "It was huge, with leather and gold embroidery." He sighs. "How lucky was I? Of course, I didn't know that at the time."

Shaw's remit was an international one: Pringle was one of the world's leading cashmere producers, exporting all over the world. "We had to learn about the demands of different countries. In the States they had the fall collection, then the holiday collection, for when they all headed off to Florida. Then there were each nationality's different characteristics. The Germans were bigger than the Italians, the French were tasty, the Japanese were wee and not used to western tastes."

He spent eight weeks researching the American market and making friends with the retail mavens of Fifth Avenue. "Most of the shops we dealt with are gone now: Bonwit Teller, amazing department stores. I had to deal with the duchesses of the buying departments. I was terrified of them."

But even Pringle's own premises were pretty fashion fabulous. The London office in Savile Row was "amazing, all wood panelled". Even the Hawick factory was groovy: "All pink mirrors, art deco style. It was pretty glamorous for a wee boy from Shettleston."

Much of Pringle's mid-century success was driven by Bill Rodger, the astonishingly far-sighted PR man who was working a product-placement-viral-marketing strategy in the post-war era. "He was using screen actresses to promote the brand as early as the 1940s. He had Moira Shearer, who was starring in the Powell and Pressburger film The Red Shoes, wearing a twinset on screen and off." (Fast forward 60-odd years and the face of Pringle is Tilda Swinton, who also rocks a twinset.)

"Bill was such an innovator. He made short films about photo shoots and other promotional activities, and got them included into Path showreels." It was You Tube for the 1940s. "These were very sophisticated concepts and are one of the reasons Pringle is the international brand it is today."

Rodger's collection of photographs of actresses and film stars in Pringle, all signed to "darling Bill", have now become part of the company's official archive.

Ooohing and aaahing over old jumpers, enjoyable thought that might be, is just the first half of the job. The Pringle archive is a living resource, for the company and the students who access it.

"It's a form of knowledge transfer," says O'Neill. His students on the BA fashion history and theory course, get to learn, in a real-life industry situation, how to run an archive, navigate the Borders' bus system and get out of bed in the morning. They then feed their treasures into the design students on the UK's most prestigious course, Louise Wilson's fashion design MA, to see where that takes them.

"It's not giving them a book to read and photocopy," he says. "It's taking them to the source. Many of these pieces are museum quality and they get to inspect the surviving garments in close detail."

In fact, Pringle's first approach was to Wilson, who has single-handedly nurtured a generation of British fashion talent. Nine out of ten of the students who tough out her course either start their own labels or are recruited by fashion's international aristocracy. Scots Christopher Kane, Louise Gray and Jonathan Saunders, as well as Richard Nicoll, Roksanda Ilincic, Louise Goldin, Mary Katrantzou, Mark Fast, Danielle Scutt and David Koma have all passed through her studio. Others have gone on to work for Lanvin, Celine, Balenciaga, Calvin Klein, Acne and Louis Vuitton.

Having spent five years as design director for Donna Karan in New York, Wilson can guide her students towards producing wear-forever jumpers as well as puffy latex catsuits and neon tweed micro-minis. The collection that has come out of the collaboration with Pringle is very much the former: quirky and clever and just fashiony enough. O'Neill is enchanted with it: "You can really see the influences. They found some of the colourways very inspirational. I think they are really clever interpretations and celebrations of the things that Pringle is known for."

Stand-out pieces are Viktor Smedinge's scribble and spot round-necked sweater, a freehand graffiti version of the iconic Argyll pattern, Yeori Bae's trompe l'oeil twinset in Park Avenue princess shades of creme caramel and William Hendry's charming real twinset with stripes that go from bottle green to off-white. It is surprising and unusual without having the slightest whiff of Giles Brandreth, which is always a worry with statement knitwear.

"Its success has been phenomenal," says O'Neill. "They have had orders from companies they hadn't heard from for ten or 15 years. One of the pieces has been shot for the September issue of American Vogue."

The archive has come to fruition when the company is refinding its feet, Former Balenciaga designer Alistair Carr took over from Claire Waight Keller in March. Around the same time American CEO Mary Adair Macaire resigned and the company is now run by Jean Fang, a member of the dynasty that has owned Pringle since 2000.

All of which means a look back at the company's extraordinary history is timely. "I think we've re-educated Pringle in what it's known for," says O'Neill. "That's a strange thing to claim, but Pringle has taken the particular direction of becoming a luxury brand. It could be accused of going too far from what it's best known for. All we've done is clarify that for them."

• The Pringle Archive Project 1815-2011 exhibition is at Harvey Nichols, Edinburgh, until 24 August, when it leaves for New York

This article was originally published in Scotland on Sunday on August 7.