You don’t just stumble upon Inis Meáin, the middle-most of the Aran Islands. Located 20km off the west coast of Ireland, sandwiched between its neighbours, Inis Mór – where parts of 2022’s The Banshees Of Inisherin were filmed, subbing in for the fictional isle location – and Inis Oírr, it is accessible only via a 45-minute ferry ride or a five-minute flight from the mainland. The official timetable says there are three flights a day, but as with so many things here, it’s best to ask a local. Hopefully, you’ll find someone who speaks fluent English, but this is far from guaranteed. Thanks to the islands’ physical remoteness, the traditional way of life has lingered and Irish is still the first language of most of the older residents.

But there is another side to the island (population circa 180). Established in 1976 by Tarlach de Blácam and his wife Áine Ní Chonghaile, the Inis Meáin Knitting Company has achieved the remarkable feat of transforming a local cottage industry – and in this case, those words are literal – into a fashion label that’s stocked at specialist retailers as far afield as New York and Tokyo. Combining the kind of old-fashioned, artisanal know-how with a strident, forward-looking approach to colour, texture and design, this special business produces short runs of equally special knitted garments.

Knitting has been a way of life on Inis Meáin since the late 19th century, when Ireland’s Congested Districts Board – set up to tackle poverty caused by the great land clearances of the 17th and 18th centuries – brought in knitters from Scotland and the Channel Islands to kick-start a small craft industry. “It became a thing for the whole family,” de Blácam says. “Not just the housewife knitting sweaters for her husband. All the women in each house learnt to knit from a very early age at their mother’s knee.”

“Everything was handmade,” says Ní Chonghaile, who grew up on the island. “It was all hand-sewn, and all the sweaters handmade, hand-knitted, to your size.”

Having first arrived on Inis Meáin as a student of Celtic languages in the late 1960s, de Blácam came to learn Irish Gaelic, but immediately fell in love with the place. It was “a very difficult lifestyle,” he says. “There was no electricity, no running water. Everything was rowed ashore by currach [a traditional type of boat].”

Noting that, without any trappings of a modern lifestyle, there was, “no chance that young people were going to stay and live here,” he and Ní Chonghaile resolved to create a business that would provide satisfying employment for locals and reverse the tide of emigration. Neither of them had any expertise in the garment trade, but knitting – Inis Meáin’s most developed industry beside farming and fishing – seemed a good place to start.

At that point, the knitting business on Inis Meáin was geared towards one thing. “The women knitted a specific, highly decorated kind of sweater for little boys and girls for their First Communion and Confirmation,” de Blácam says. “It was usually highly intricate [with cabled designs], and angelic white wool.”

In the mid-20th century, merchants from overseas came to the island, demanding such pieces in luxury fabrics to be sold in the US, which meant that the style eventually made it into the wardrobes of Hollywood stars. “In the 1950s and 1960s, you had Steve McQueen and Marilyn Monroe sporting Aran sweaters in fast cars and in movies. The story of the Aran sweater became more important.”

However, de Blácam had bigger plans – he wanted the new Inis Meáin knitwear be more modern, more everyday wear as opposed to Sunday best. Working with local experts such as Máirín Ni Dhomhnaill – a knitter whose skills were so renowned as to have earnt her a place on an Irish postage stamp in 1983 – de Blácam identified design elements within the classic Aran Isles knitwear that he thought could be developed into more restrained and contemporary pieces. “Every season, we’d be moving this workwear story on a little bit,” he says, with every collection featuring up to 50 new designs.

Over the years, the brand has also experimented with colour, partly by the shades of the island’s landscape, where vast expanses of grey limestone rock are offset by lush grassy greens and shocks of vibrant wildflowers in pink and yellow. “I would be careful using pastels,” de Blácam says. “You see too many pastels in the winter landscape in Inis Meáin. Colour here is a bit more vibrant.”

While the brand ships far and wide and sources quality yarns from abroad, all its products are still made, from start to finish, here on the island. On one side of the building, high-tech Japanese knitting machines are used to produce intricately cabled knit panels from premium yarns, such as cashmere, silk and linen; on the other, expert hand-knitters, who have been learning the craft since birth, manually link the panels together to seamlessly finish the garments. In an industry where a garment might be sent to a different factory for each stage of its creation, it’s a rare thing to see a product coming together from scratch in a single space.

It’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer industriousness on display. However, Inis Meáin is also, still, a rather quiet and peaceful place, a small town with a single pub, shop, church and post office, and two schools attended by little more than a handful of students.

For de Blácam, despite the island’s diminutive size, there is more to discover. “I’m always walking,” he says. “I think as you get on in life, you begin to realise things that you’d sort of scoot past maybe when you were younger. [But] more and more nowadays, I seem to be seeing things that I didn’t see before.”