I Have Bought Cardigans for Forty Years. This Is the One I Would Hand You First.

Most of them ended up in a drawer. One of them now lives on the hook by my back door, and I can tell you exactly why.

Diane Pelletier · Ottawa, Ontario · October 2026 · 6 min read

I'm 63, I live in Ottawa, and I've been buying cardigans for forty years. Until this fall, I could have shown you a whole drawer of proof that I was bad at it.

There's the grey one whose buttons gave up before Christmas. The navy one that grew shoulders like a coat hanger. The cream one that pilled at the elbows after a single wash, and the one from the mall that said "wool" on the sign and "acrylic" on the label. I kept every one of them, the way you do, in case they improved. They didn't.

Then came the first cold weekend in September, at our cottage on the Rideau. It was 22 degrees at lunch and 6 by the time the sun went down over the water, and I spent the whole day pulling a wool pullover over my head and back off again. By supper my hair stood straight up with static, and my granddaughter asked me, very seriously, if I was "okay, Mamie."

My sister Louise watched all of this from the dock in a cardigan she simply buttoned and unbuttoned as the day went along. Then she said the thing that started this letter.

"Diane, a pullover is a decision you make at seven in the morning and then live with all day. A cardigan, you can change your mind about."

She was right. She was also wearing the loveliest cardigan I'd seen in years, with a knitted yoke in cream, red and moss green around the shoulders, like something passed down from a grandmother in Reykjavík. I asked where it came from before she'd finished her coffee. It came from Sylvie & Odette, a small boutique in Montréal, and I've worn my own nearly every day since.

I've bought enough bad cardigans to know what a good one looks like. There are six things I would point out to you if you were standing in my kitchen, in the order I noticed them.

1.It adjusts. A pullover doesn't.

Open at the breakfast table, buttoned to fetch the paper off the porch, over the back of a chair by two o'clock, and back on at dusk. You never have to commit to one temperature for the whole day, and in an Ottawa October the temperature changes its mind four times before supper. Mine hasn't been back in the closet once. It lives on the hook by the back door, between Gilles's toque and the dog leash.

2.The sleeves are properly finished

The cuff is knitted in, not cut and hemmed, so there's no raw edge to fray and nothing to unravel at the wrist. That matters more on a cardigan than on anything else you own, because a cardigan gets shoved up your forearms twenty times a day. I push mine up to do the dishes every single evening, and the cuffs still sit flat and snug the next morning.

3.A thick, woolly knit that actually holds the heat

It's a brushed, densely knit yarn, heavy enough to stand on the dock in the evening wind off the river. Cheap acrylic feels warm in a heated store and turns clammy on the walk to the car, because it has nowhere to put the moisture. This doesn't. I wore mine all day indoors at Thanksgiving, with the oven going for six hours, and never once had to take it off because I was too hot.

4.Buttons that don't give up

The first thing to fail on a cheap cardigan is never the knit. It's a button, somewhere around the second week of December. These are sewn on properly, with a little shank so the buttonhole has somewhere to sit, and they look like small pearls against the red. Six weeks of buttoning and unbuttoning, a dozen times a day, and every one of them is exactly where it started.

5.It keeps its shape on the hook

A cardigan spends its life hanging, not folded, and cheap ones grow coat-hanger shoulders within a month. Deep ribbing at the cuffs and the hem and a properly set shoulder are what stop that. Mine has hung by the back door all season and it still closes the way it did the day it arrived.

6.A whole wall of patterns, S through 5XL, one price

Not one cardigan in seven colours. A whole collection of patterns, each with its own knitted yoke, and every one of them comes in Small right up to 5XL, cut so the pattern lands across the chest where it should. Louise wears a 3XL and I wear a medium, and you would never guess it from the way they sit. Nothing costs more at 4XL than it does at Small. I've never understood why it ever should.

These, against the ones I'd been buying

You can find a cardigan for sixty dollars almost anywhere, and most women I know have two of them in a drawer. I certainly did. Here's the difference, laid out plainly.

A cardigan is the only warm thing you can change your mind about halfway through the day. That's the whole reason it's the one I would hand you first.

Why they're 52% off right now

I'm suspicious by nature, so when I saw the price I wrote to the boutique and asked what the catch was. Sylvie herself wrote back.

It's their fall sale. They put the whole cardigan collection on one run at close to what it costs them, once, to start the season. Not a sale that rolls on forever. When a pattern sells out in your size, that's the end of that one, and after the sale the cardigans go back to $165.00 CAD.

Right now they're $79.95 CAD, in every size.$165.00 CAD

I read the reviews before I ordered, the way I imagine you're doing now. They sit at 4.2 stars. Not one of those suspiciously perfect fives, which, if I'm honest, made me trust them more.

What I'd tell you if we were friends

Go and open your cardigan drawer. If what you find is a row of grey and navy with loose buttons, stretched cuffs and coat-hanger shoulders, you already know what I knew in September. It's worth ten minutes of your evening to have a look at these.

Two practical things. The sale is on now and the middle sizes always go first, so if there's a pattern you love, don't sit on it for a week the way I nearly did. And you have 30 days to send it back, which is a very cheap way to find out whether Louise was right about me.

Forty years of cardigans, and the best one cost me less than the worst.

Diane

About the writer

Diane Pelletier is 63 and lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with her husband Gilles and a retriever. She is a customer, not a fashion writer, and she was not paid to write this letter.

The Sylvie & Odette Knit Cardigans

★★★★☆ 4.2 out of 5

$79.95 CAD$165.00 CAD

• A thick, woolly knit that holds the heat and softens with wear
• Knitted-in cuffs and deep ribbing that keep their shape
• Buttons sewn on with a shank, made to stay put
• A whole collection of knitted yokes · sizes S to 5XL, one price
• Free shipping across Canada · 30-day returns

See which cardigans are still in your size

Fall sale on now. When a pattern sells out in your size, it's gone.

This page is an advertisement for Sylvie & Odette. Sylvie & Odette · Montréal · Free shipping across Canada · 30-day returns.