What’s hot in The Bear kitchen? Carmy’s traditional T-shirt

When the Emmys are awarded in September, everything points to a grand triumph for the dark comedy The Bear. The show about an award-winning chef reviving a sandwich shop, which returned to television screens this summer, has bagged a record 23 nominations.
Its popularity is also thanks to an unlikely protagonist: 30 antique knitting machines that are buzzing in the Swabian Alps, deep in Germany’s southwest.
The machines and their operators create the perfectly tailored T-shirts that Carmy Berzatto, the chef played by the American actor Jeremy Allen White, dons in kitchen scenes. White has featured in innumerable publicity shots and trailers, and the look has turned him into a fashion model and earned the show’s designers an Emmy nomination.
The plain white T-shirt, with prices from a steep €70, is produced by the Berlin-based label Merz b. Schwanen. The label was founded in 1911 and still uses rare loopwheel knitting machines in its production.
Since the label was identified on the show, the brand has been swamped by demand. Sales have increased by 300 per cent in two years, with orders from as far afield as Fiji and Brazil, the company said.
Courtney Wheeler, the stylist for The Bear, said that White tried on ten to 12 different styles and brands until Merz b. Schwanen emerged as a perfect fit.
The traditional production method is perhaps the secret to this because it involves weaving cotton into continuous loops that require no side stitches.
However, it also limits the T-shirt’s availability. There are few loopwheel machines still working and even fewer people who can fix them when they break down. The classic white T-shirt is hard to get and the company has a waiting list of about 12,000 customers.
The label had fallen into abeyance before the fashion designers Gitta and Peter Plotnicki stumbled across a 90-year-old Merz b. Schwanen shirt in a Berlin flea market in 2011. The couple decided to revive the brand and its vintage production methods.
The turnaround fits into a broader pattern of traditional German brands appearing on the fashion map in recent years. The flagship example is Birkenstock, a producer of comfortable shoes, previously worn by hippies and ridiculed as the embodiment of German tastelessness, but which has increased its revenues more than tenfold in the decade to 2022. It is now partially owned by the French billionaire Bernard Arnault, 75, who also owns Louis Vuitton, the fashion house.
It has helped that the fashion industry has embraced those attributes that were previously shunned as unfashionable in German clothing, according to Bernhard Roetzel, the fashion critic and author. Quality, functionality and sustainability have become key values, Roetzel says, alongside the post-pandemic trend of unflashy “quiet luxury”.
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This spirit appears to have aligned perfectly with Carmy, whom the show’s designers describe as “a person that appreciates quality and classics, items that last, that aren’t fussy or trendy”.
If the Chicago-based chef existed, he could make a shopping trip to Soho, New York, where Merz b. Schwanen opened its first store outside Germany earlier this year to capitalise on a new audience of admirers.