Deep inside a bustling 25,000sq ft arts and crafts facility in Downtown Los Angeles, rows of artisans are hard at work knitting, weaving, linking and piecing cashmere yarn to a soundtrack of white noise so repetitive it could lull a newborn baby to sleep. “This is the sound of our company,” says The Elder Statesman founder Mr Greg Chait as we walk through well-spaced rows of industrial knitting machines. “It’s like our theme song.

“This is not something you see very much. You’re watching things being made and I think in today’s modern times, you need to be reminded. It’s like when a restaurant opens its kitchen and you can see the grill and all the ingredients right in front of you. It’s a special experience.”

It is certainly an impressive space for someone who started his luxury loungewear label in 2007 from his living room in Venice Beach with a simple line of cashmere blankets. By 2011, the brand, created in honour of Chait’s elder brother, who died 18 years ago, had expanded into clothing (oversized cardigans, joggers and crew-neck sweaters) and was being sold in luxury stores across the country.

When it opened its own store in West Hollywood in 2014, the company’s headquarters were in Culver City, spread out over three buildings. Chait had been on the lookout for a single, multistorey space that could, in addition to a factory, house everything from the accounts department to the fulfilment centre. In 2018, he found it in the traditional garment area of Downtown, “central to where the talent is”.

“The space we inhabit is so important,” he says. “It’s what we do. It’s the vibe. It’s the energy.” Chait now employs 80-plus people, many of whom were involved in creating a capsule collection of stripy knits, slouchy T-shirts and cosy cardigans from deadstock yarn, available exclusively on MR PORTER this autumn. “All the pieces in this collection have so much soul,” he says. “That’s the common thread.”

A kaleidoscopic explosion of colour, the collection perfectly exemplifies how The Elder Statesman and its talented team of artisans operate. “I get a lot of pride when things come from unexpected places,” says Chait. “This is a pure example of what we do. If we have an extra cone of yarn, we don’t just throw it out. We created techniques for using deadstock yarn from day one because it’s expensive and beautiful and I don’t see any point in wasting it. It’s like, let’s come up with ways we can use it at all times. Hence why I ended up building my own factory.

“The stripes on the sweaters are called Knitter’s Choice, so every knitter can lay down whatever stripes they want. I came up with that because how boring would it be to follow one pattern all day? There’s creativity in each one, so every piece is one of a kind.”

Sporting a leather vest he made seven years ago (that didn’t make it into a collection), Chait is so passionate about the raw materials and keeping “every piece of fluff”, he unexpectedly branched out into soft toys. “One day, I just decided to make a teddy bear and it turned into this weird teddy bear business,” he says. Just last month, he found himself making a sleeping bag. “I just made it. You don’t know how something is going to turn out. You have an idea and within 12 hours you can see how it’s going to be. That’s the beauty of this environment.”

For a relatively young company, The Elder Statesman has some long-standing staff members. As we walk out of the factory space and upstairs to his office, Chait says hi to Tina, a linker (she attaches pieces of garment together) who has been with the company for 10 years, and Lina, a piecer (she inspects the garments) who has worked here for five and a half.

“I love everything about working at The Elder Statesman,” says another employee, Alex, who works in production and sample making. “The best thing is the creativity and having a collective team.”

The team is such a collective that it was the brand’s wholesale director, Mr Michael Ragen, who could be considered more corporate than creative, who came up with the idea for the deadstock yarn capsule. “I just love that good ideas can come from every part of the company,” says Chait.

It was the pandemic that cemented the company as a unit who were more like family than mere work colleagues. While Covid guidelines dictated that the factory temporarily close, Chait saw no reason to shut down the business completely and machines were moved into homes (luckily, knitting is legal at home in California, although cutting and sewing are not).

“We treated it like a village,” he says. “We kept it going. I wanted to protect my workforce. If we just shut down, what would happen to the people who’ve spent 30 or 40 years learning how to do this amazing craft? A lot of people were cancelling orders. We were confirming them. We were calling our yarn vendors saying, ‘What do you have? Ship us everything you’ve got.’”

Chait went as far as building a washhouse (“We have our own wash. It’s like the KFC 11 herbs and spices – I can’t tell you exactly what it is”) from scratch in Topanga. “I thought, I’m going to be the wash guy,” he says. “That’s how I started out. Everybody had great ideas. It wasn’t just me masterminding. It was 40 people – the number of employees at the time – coming together as a unit for each other. On that front, it really worked out and I’m really proud of them.”

The makeshift washhouse wasn’t necessary. As soon as it was safe to socially distance, the team were back in the facility and able to operate fully. “This building saved us,” says Chait. “I know it sounds super cheesy, but it really provided for us. Space was everything. I said, let’s get utilitarian about this and we brought in everybody little by little."

As my tour of The Elder Statesman headquarters draws to a close, Chait is keen to show me the hand-spun yarn. Cashmere is sourced from as far afield as Italy, Japan and Mongolia.

“I can’t really say where we get it from, but it’s the best possible yarn,” says Chait, pulling out a cone from one of the hundreds of boxes that line the corridor. “If you bring in the best possible materials and make things in the best possible way, even the simplest thing isn’t simple. It’s got soul. We’re never trying to cut corners. In fact, we’re always trying to make things harder on ourselves.”

Speaking of which, Chait once learnt how to spin yarn and still does it as a hobby. “It’s really meditative,” he says. “I’m not great at it, but I like it. I really want to start spinning yarn here and have our own little mill.”

Sounds like a plan. And with a collective such as The Elder Statesman, completely achievable. Teamwork does, after all, make the dream work. “If it were just me, the company would be very small and making sleeping bags, leather vests and giant teddy bears,” says Chait.