Henry Zankov Makes Knitwear Seductive

Henry Zankov built his reputation on knitwear that dodges the obvious. No safe cable knits, no easy neutrals. Instead, he works with inside-out argyles, brushed cashmere stripes with a little grit, and sequins worked into mohair for texture and shine. For him, knitwear isn’t just comfort. It’s craft, starting with a single stitch and pushing it until it becomes shape.

Born in St. Petersburg and raised in New York, Zankov absorbed Russian constructivism and ’90s MTV in equal measure. He learned English from hip-hop videos; he learned design from studying yarn like it was paint. The result is a visual language that’s instantly recognizable, bold, graphic, and heirloom-minded.

Today, he shows his latest collection, expanding beyond knits into silk, tailoring, and upholstery-inspired jacquards for fall 2026. The mood is darker, more intimate, a little escapist. But the thread remains the same. At Zankov, everything starts and ends with color.

You didn’t start out in knitwear. What pulled you toward it, and what made you want to do it differently?

When I was in school, my teacher told me to study knitwear. So I took some classes, and I really enjoyed the idea of creating a stitch, creating a textile, to creating a fabric out of yarn. I was like, This is amazing. This is what I want to do. Knitwear is very much associated with something cozy, but I really wanted to bring a seductive, more playful element into the knitwear category itself.

What’s the part of New York Fashion Week you look forward to the most?

One of my favorite parts is the casting. I like it when models are a little kooky, when they’re a little weird. I like faces of people that feel like they’re not cookie-cutter and a little bit more unconventional and subversive. I guess the character who has a kind of wisdom to them. A face has to carry some kind of knowledge, some kind of experience. I find that to be very beautiful.

I also love going to all the shows of my friends — Christopher John Rogers, Rachel Scott from Diotima. We have a really great community in New York of designers, and we’re all very tightly knit. So it becomes almost like a family affair.

What’s guiding this new collection — and what feels different about it from last season?

The focus this season is on upholstery textures, so we’re developing a lot of really interesting new jacquards based on old antique upholstery fabric.

There’s a kind of natural flow between one season and the next — the textiles and the yarns and techniques that we’ve created. There’s definitely a love for clashing color and clashing textures together.

What informs the way you think about color?

We love color here at Zankov, and usually a lot of the colors that we are inspired by come from nature, come from gemstones, come from mid-century architecture. Anything that feels old or from nature is something that we’re very much inspired by. And then we love to juxtapose that with colors that feel a little bit jarring to create a bit of a tension point.