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. It is currently dangerously cool to go out and knit publicly, with, for instance, Cast Off, a.k.a. the Knitting Club for Boys and Girls. They have held knit-ins in a variety of unlikely places — on the Circle Line, in the American bar of the Savoy Hotel and in Tate Modern. They were summarily ejected from the Savoy even though they were smartly dressed and ordered expensive cocktails. It was feared that the click, click of needles would annoy other guests. The sight of young men knitting was seen as faintly shocking also. So, there we have it. Knitting can be subversive. That Cast Off’s knitting invasion of Tate Modern did not go down particularly well reminds us that back in the 1970s nothing annoyed unreconstructed male art critics more than the use of domestic skills like knitting, along with crochet and embroidery, to disrupt the categories of high and low art and the distinction between amateur and professional artist.
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