Meet the Mother-Daughter Knitting Duo Behind Kendall Jenner’s ‘Paris, Texas’ Halloween Costume

This Halloween, Kendall Jenner showed up to her yearly Los Angeles costume party at Chateau Marmont in a fuzzy pink sweater dress inspired by the 1984 film “Paris, Texas.” While the outfit was half of a couple’s costume—with the model’s beau, Jacob Elordi, dressed up as the film’s protagonist in a red baseball cap and suit—the model and reality star’s costume held up on its own thanks to the boutique knitwear brand Suss Knits.

The LA-based knitwear line specializes in hand-knit womenswear, whilst also selling artwork, children's knits, accessories, and custom projects like Jenner’s made-to-order costume. “Knitting is almost a dying art, but we're still doing it,” the younger of the mother-daughter design duo behind the brand, Hanna, tells The Set Set. Jenner’s “Paris, Texas” costume was born when her stylist, Dani Mitchell, reached out to Hanna over email after previously collaborating on a sweater for Hailey Bieber’s Rhode campaign. “We didn't have an actual piece to work from, so [Mitchell] sent the concept,” Hanna says. From there, she and her mom proceeded to measure and draw a pattern loosely based on a different mini dress Jenner’s team sent along, and multiple rewatches of the Wim Wenders film. Once the measurements were locked, they created the dress on a hand-loom knitting machine. 

The original dress, as designed by Swedish costume designer Brigetta Bjerke, was made of an itchy mohair. To adapt the design into a more wearable material, Hanna forewent mohair for a combination of her mother’s signature viscose yarn, cotton, and lycra. “We work in this magical yarn and that's what [Jenner and her team] just fell in love with,” Hanna says of how they emulated the original garment’s fuzziness out of much more comfortable fabric. The hardest aspect of constructing the dress’ silhouette was nailing its signature low back and boat-neck neckline, which drapes across the shoulders without falling off. “We spent a lot of time watching the movie, pulling stills, and trying to gauge what percentage of the body in the film is open in the back, “ Hanna says. 

Hanna learned how to knit from her mother, Suss, who learned from her grandmother in Sweden. For 20 years, Suss operated out of a knitting emporium on Beverley Boulevard where she hosted knitting classes while raising her daughter. Throughout her 40-year career, Suss has built a wide-ranging portfolio spanning from the eclectic sweaters in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” to a comfortable, knit tie for that scene in “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “I always say yes to everything, and then I work hard to make it happen,” Suss says. The knitting aficionado takes inspiration from tattooing, hand-dyeing, and the essence of her materials. “Yarn is alive. It's not a piece of fabric that you just lay down like a piece of paper and you cut. It can do whatever it wants once it's spun,” Suss says. 

While Hanna’s foray into knitwear may have seemed inevitable, she never had deliberate plans to continue her mother’s craft. Instead, she attended school for painting and honed a more generalized skill set in fashion and business. During college, Hanna recalls bringing her mother’s designs to campus and conducting makeshift sample sales out of her dorm, whilst pursuing her own fashion ventures. The duo joined forces in 2020 when Hanna returned to LA and got back into knitting. “There's a lot of chaos in the world and people look to art for relief or nostalgia,” Hanna says. For her, that meant revisiting her mom’s runway shows from the early 2000s and marketing them to a millennial/ Gen-Z audience. “Hanna was with me the whole time, being part of everything,” Suss says. “That's why it's so perfect we are together, because she's taking the whole beautiful idea to a new level now.”

Since Jenner revealed her Halloween look, the duo’s Instagram DMs have been slammed with admirers of the costume, hoping to purchase or knit their own version. Suss Knits currently sells a hand-loomed version of the “Paris, Texas” dress online for $450, and is planning to roll out kits so fans can make their own version of the dress. “The really fun part was people asking about the yarn specifically,” Hanna says. “My mom used to sit in her store with walls and walls of all these yarns that she would blend together, so it was already our plan to offer skeins of mixed yarn again.” At the brand’s upcoming November 14th pop-up in Los Angeles, current collections, archival knits, samples, and skeins of yarn will be available for purchase.