In the early 1980s, reprints of Little House on the Prairie, Anne of Green Gables, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, and anything by Beatrix Potter sold well and generated a market for nostalgically "feminine," lacy, and ruffly styles--often on shirts worn with jeans or skirts worn with T-shirts and leather jackets.
Knitted sweaters were not an authentic Victorian style for women at all. Victorian knitters made socks, mittens, shawls, scarves, purses, and coverings for everything, but their jackets were made of woven fabric or fur (or both). Edwardians wore sweaters as men's sportwear, not part of a girly-girl look. In the Eighties knitters tried to fill in the gap with lacy and ruffly sweaters that seemed to an Eighties eye to fit in with Victorian and Edwardian styles.
What's Victorian about this Annette Mitchell design? It's a 1980s casual sweater shape knitted in a type of cheap yarn that sold best in the 1970s. (No apologies. I used Red Heart, so the sweater is almost indestructible. You could peel it off, throw it into a snowbank, forget about it till springtime, dig up the sodden object and run it through washing and drying machines, and the creamy white sections would be as creamy as ever. It's a relatively cheap yarn that resembles some even cheaper yarns, but it's a good yarn for those who like machine-laundering their sweaters.) But the texture comes from a cluster stitch pattern Victorians did use--for borders on mitts or scarves, or the endless dustcovers they put over everything that didn't move away. And some Victorians liked the new, loud combinations they got from those new aniline dyes. Not all the dyes they used were as reliable as ours, but consider the way writers like Louisa May Alcott enthused about "pretty" combinations like beet and carrot--compared to which this mix of cream, teal, and burgundy seems mellow.
This Pat Mencini design uses more fancy stitches Victorians used for lacy accessories. Victorian ladies didn't wear bulky, boxy cardigans, but after the novelty of beet and carrot colors wore off there was a late Victorian fashion craze for all shades of pink, rose, mauve, lavender, and purple.
What was considered to make a sweater 1980s "Victorian"?
a. Very fluffy or very smooth yarns. Real Victorians loved angora, alpaca, and mohair (for shawls and scarves) and any form of silk.
b. Glittering yarn spun with strands of lurex or olefin was not an authentic Victorian fashion, but it was part of the fluffy-ruffles look of the eighties.
c. Elaborate textured stitches, preferably in lightweight yarns. Throughout the Eighties knitting designers tried to revive interest in knitting traditional shapes with lightweight yarns, as favored in the Edwardian era. Knitters tended to study these dainty lightweight pieces, say "Pretty, pretty," and carry on knitting with blanket-weight yarns. Few people had time to knit at eight stitches to the inch any more. However, for knitters who were willing to commit to long slow-growing projects, knitting with thin yarn paid off with lighter, more wearable, more flattering sweaters. Throughout the Eighties, designers like Sasha Kagan, Patricia Roberts, and Alice Starmore created patterns intended to entice knitters back to thin yarns--but those who bought their yarn at Woolworth's, K-Mart, and other forerunners to Wal-Mart didn't find a good selection of thin yarns, and kept up the clamor for patterns to be made with thick yarns.
d. Natural fibres were a subject of controversy among knitters in the Eighties, and still are. Wool is the most traditional yarn for knitting, and many knitters actually love the feel of natural wool yarn on our fingers. People trying to market wool yarn insisted that it was the ideal type for knitting. People who were in fact allergic to chemicals used to process wool in the early twentieth century said that in that case knitting was obsolete, because wool was obsolete--they wouldn't touch a wool sweater. Too many wool lovers adopted a defensive attitude I call wool snobbery, or woolly-bullying. "Well, if you're satisfied with other fibres," they said, nonverbally adding "then you're a hopeless case and we don't want to be seen with you. Stay out of our wool shops." Most things actually knitted and worn in the 1980s were acrylic but, toward the end of the decade, cotton yarn started to become popular.
Designers who went in for the updated Victorian-influenced styles in a big way were Laura Ashley, Annette Mitchell, and Pat Mencini; designs by Nancy Vale, Edina Ronay, Sasha Kagan, Alice Starmore, and Christian de Falbe often fitted into the fluffy-ruffles look.
e. There is no question that shaped lightweight sweaters that follow the contours of a woman's body, more or less, are a feminine look. However, in the 1980s nobody but Christian de Falbe seemed to remember how to knit them. People remembered that the 1940s form-fitting sweater look was achieved by wearing a wool sweater while it was wet and letting it shrink to fit; in the 1980s people admired the fortitude of those who'd actually done that, but they weren't going to do it themselves. Designers seemed not to remember how to shape sweaters. Eighties knitting magazines are full of pleas for shaping and fitting, which designers generally ignored.
Pattern books to look for:
1. The most obviously Victorian (or, properly, Edwardian) inspirations in an Eighties pattern book were Annette Mitchell's. The Country Diary Book of Knitting, all knitting with more than eighty Eighties patterns for sweaters, accessories, and stuffed toys, actually came after The Country Diary Book of Crafts.
2. Pat Mencini, listed as a contributor to the books above, wrote her own Edwardian-inspired Beatrix Potter Knitting Book. Amazon doesn't even have a page for this one, though it was available in many wool shops in the Eighties and may still be in some of them.
3. Though the cover sweater on this book was not part of the Eighties idea of Victorian or Edwardian style, many of the designs inside the book were.
4. Christian de Falbe had his own wool shop, designed his own wools, and printed his own fashion magazines (with the help of a lot of anonymous people) in the 1980s. Most of his designs weren't photographed with long skirts, lace ascots, or picture hats--but most of the favorites collected in his hardcover book might have been, and some were photographed with hats and gloves. Amazon lists several copies of this book but does not have a picture of it. Click on the title to buy Designs in Hand Knitting.
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