Only one romantic comedy can claim a plot that’s sparked by a garish Christmas pullover. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, filmed in 2001 and based on Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel, protagonist Bridget (Renée Zellweger) encounters Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) at a family party. He’s wearing a woolly rollneck decorated with a giant reindeer. It’s ugly enough to squish Bridget’s nascent interest in Mark. Whiz forward through lots of romcom ups and downs, and a second Christmas occasion brings Bridget and Mark together again. This time his seasonal fashion crime is a snowman-patterned tie, but they get through it and couple up Photograph: PR
Bert wears a V-neck with vertical stripes and Ernie a crew with horizontals: the loungewear of Sesame Street’s best friends has not changed in 31 years. And kudos to Bert and Ernie for taking the time to dress – most of the characters in the famed children’s TV show go roguishly nude. (Though Big Bird, it must be said, sometimes wears a tie.) Bizarrely, the fact of Bert and Ernie’s co-ordinated jumpers has been interpreted by some as a clue to the true nature of their relationship. Internet theories abound that the pair are actually a couple, something denied by producers Photograph: Christof Stache/Associated Press
The late Apple boss owned “like a hundred” identical black turtlenecks, made for him by Japanese designer Issey Miyake. Tucked into blue jeans, he wore them at every public appearance in the later years of his life. The idea occurred to Jobs during a trip to Sony’s factories in Japan in the 1980s. Workers there wore Miyake-designed outfits and Jobs hoped to introduce the concept at Apple. “Oh man, did I get booed,” he said. Regardless, he took on a uniform himself, explaining to his biographer not long before his death in 2011: “I have enough [turtlenecks] to last for the rest of my life” Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Didn’t she ever get hot? No matter how many ghouls the Mystery Gang were required to run away from, in Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo cartoons broadcast from the 60s, Velma never shed her vast orange polo neck. The jumper, along with co-ordinated knee-high socks and thick glasses, made clear the character’s status as team dork. When the Scooby-Doo cartoons spawned a pair of live-action films in the early 00s, Velma was portrayed by Linda Cardellini and the famous jumper became figure hugging as well as much, much lower cut. Oh, Hollywood. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
With more unfortunates dispatched and detective Sarah Lund moodily intuiting over the corpses, a third and final series of The Killing is heading to a close on BBC4. Would Søren Sveistrup’s Danish crime drama have proved a lasting success but for the strange appeal of Lund’s jumpers? Unlikely. We fell for her beige-and-chocolate knit in series one. In series two (involving a trip to Afghanistan) she wore Faroese wool under a flak jacket. Sofie Gråbøl, who plays Lund, recently said the jumper was nearly cut for series three, but the decision was reversed as it would have been “traumatic” Photograph: PR
The double-strap leather gun holster and the lightning-fast Ford Mustang helped… But don’t discount the navy rollneck as a key factor in Frank Bullitt’s lasting appeal. Steve McQueen played the title character in Peter Yates’s 1968 thriller, and for great chunks of it was dressed in the jumper that was on all the posters. In the film’s famous car chase he wore it under a tweed blazer. Shortly afterwards his onscreen girlfriend, played by Jacqueline Bisset, pitches up in a dark rollneck of her own – influenced, perhaps, by McQueen’s style in a way that many generations of Bullitt fans would be too Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
Though so often recalled in a cocktail dress – maybe The Seven Year Itch one, with its unreliable skirt, or the Some Like It Hot one, with that weird belly-strap of sequins – Marilyn Monroe could absolutely rock a jumper. See the plunging grey cable-knit in Let’s Make Love, or the black cashmere she wore in a famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photoshoot for Life magazine in 1953. A similar black turtleneck appeared in the recent biopic, My Week With Marilyn, in those brilliant early scenes between Monroe (played by Michelle Williams) and Zoe Wanamaker’s eccentric acting mentor, Paula Strasberg Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
First sketched on the back of a cigarette packet by Beano subeditor Ian “Chiz” Chisholm, an idea later realised by artist Davey Law, Dennis made his first appearances in March 1951 wearing school uniform. The character’s famous red and black jumper first appeared about two months later (in a half-page strip about terrorising a cat with a peashooter) and never went away, despite Dennis’s brief flirtation with a tracksuit in 1991. The exact origins of the famous jumper went unaddressed until a special anniversary strip in 2001 explained how Dennis had stolen it in an early act of menacing Photograph: PR
Really this list could be Bill Cosby from start to finish. Over the eight-year run of the The Cosby Show, beginning in 1984, its lead actor modelled a simply staggering array of patterned jumpers. Recently Cosby has been tweeting old pictures of his favourites: the one that showed a city skyline in blue and black wool; the cheeky burgundy and green number with three yellow hearts in its centre; a weird knitted pattern showing three athletes. Meanwhile for the past 18 months, a blog called the Cosby Sweater Project has been gathering images of the famed garments. It’s a must-visit for Cosby and jumper fans alike Photograph: Public Domain
The late Ballesteros is exalted in the golf world for many things. His easy off-course charm; his multiple on-course victories; his enduring sense of style. Central to the latter was Seve’s penchant for navy V-necks, which he often wore during the final rounds of major competitions – most famously at the 1979 British Open, which he won. When Ballesteros died last year, the golfer’s brother told reporters that he’d been dressed in his trademark sweater after passing away. And in September, at the 2012 Ryder Cup, the European team wore navy V-necks in poignant tribute to their former captain Photograph: David Cannon/Getty Images
