Tanya Harrod

Subversive needles

issue 19 March 2005

When Henry Moore wanted to make clear that he thought Eric Gill’s sculpture dull and unadventurous, he compared it to knitting. Times have changed, and knitting has become worryingly fashionable, hence the Crafts Council’s delightful exhibition Knit 2 Together. There is, however, a strange feeling of déjà vu about all this. Remember the barefoot California boy Kaffe Fassett, dubbed by Sir Roy Strong the ‘genius of the knitting needle’? There was a knitting renaissance back in the 1980s. Fassett had plenty of imitators with the result that a small knitwear business or an exciting yarn shop came to epitomise the brighter side of Mrs Thatcher’s enterprise culture. But fashion is fickle. By the 1990s, time had run out for shapeless waistcoats knitted in all the colours of the rainbow.

The more recent reinvention of knitting has been less about product and more about performance.

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