A sweater mystery

I spent New Year's Day at the museum

(where you can get the best lunches and desserts! not that this is why I go; it's for intellectual pursuits. Really. Because if I eat enough of the carrot cake with cream cheese icing they serve there I will totally be able to pin down the recipe with my brain. Ha - intellectual!)

seeing, among other things, an exhibition of portraits printed in Vanity Fair over the years.

And what I'd like to know is:

Why did Cary Grant let himself be photographed wearing a crewneck pullover with a consistently placed plethora of pills?

They were soft fuzzy pills, not the attached-by-a-thread kind that are so easy to shave off. And they were everywhere, all over the front and sleeves. I'm not talking about halo here. I'm talking about a halo convention - the kind where halo bits hook up with other halo bits and talk shop in the hallways between sessions.

I think it had to be from washing, unless he had just hugged a tree and the bark didn't want to let go (and who could blame it if so? this is Cary Grant we're talking about!*)

That's mystery number one. Mystery number two is, what kind of yarn does that? Straight mohair?

Anyway this is what I will be pondering today as I reknit my aunt's hat. Again.


UPDATED TO ADD

A link to the photo. You can zoom in on it, and I thought at one point it was herringbone, but when I zoomed more I could say that - nope, just pills on stocking stitch.

Surely it wasn't 100% acrylic?


*maybe he'd just been fending off the embraces of thousands of fans?