(Music link: I found a long one, longer than this post will take to read, for the official bard of Knitter's, Norman Kennedy. In addition to music, NK's desire to preserve Scottish traditions led him to study weaving and knitting. In its early days Knitter's magazine had a sibling, Weaver's, and both magazines advertised NK's records. YouTube recordings of his songs unfortunately seem to be full-length performances; you can stop at any point, of course. If you want to test your Gaelic, the two songs in Gaelic come in the last half-hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEc-0-2t1fI )
I was reading back through my collection of Knitter's magazines this week, and I noticed something.
I had bought every issue of Knitter's for years; had gone into stores just to buy the latest Knitter's. After an uneven start that magazine came out quarterly, as did several other knitting pattern magazines that flourished between 1980 and 2010. I usually took in a $20 bill and was able to buy the latest issues of Interweave Knits, Vogue Knitting, and one of the others at the same time but I went in looking for Knitter's.
Why?
And also, I'd stored all my Knitter's in one place. Other magazines were just in the pattern hoard, which is divided into two categories: clean books (or magazines) and moldy ones. Magazines go moldy faster than books do, and deteriorate faster even if they're not moldy. Magazines also tended to gravitate to the bottoms of boxes and the backs of shelves as least-often-consulted patterns. When I found yarn on sale, over the years, and came home to consider what I was going to make of this lovely stuff, I usually had one or two patterns in mind and would review the books in which those patterns appeared first. Then if the amount of yarn, or the stitch gauge I got with it, turned out not to be quite right for the first pattern I had in mind, there were the books I'd browse through first and the books I'd browse through later. Magazines were generally in the "later" file, partly because unnecessary handling would add wear and tear, partly because they were less likely to contain patterns that hadn't stuck in my mind but that turned out to be just right for the yarn on sale.
But that's only part of the reason why the magazines drifted to the back and the bottom of my collection. I can't afford to knit as much as I do just so I can wear a different sweater every day all winter long. I knit for other people. They are a diverse lot of other people. I really enjoy knitting for visitors who grew up in other countries and didn't absorb the prejudice against real wool from which so many Americans suffer, so yes, I'd agree that the small market for real hand knitting includes "upscale" clients. It also includes wheelchair dwellers, and children and their frazzled parents. And old and young, rich and poor, male and female, the clients who've visited my pattern hoard with me have gravitated in the same directions I did. Books over magazines--except for Knitter's, and a few early issues of Interweave Knits. Those magazines stay among the books.
Older people in my part of the world used to include magazines and even catalogues in their definition of "books." Once in a posh wool shop a member of my generation carelessly slipped into this habit, saying (before I'd started looking for Knitter's) "We have a new Knitter's book." Then, catching herself speaking her grandparents' dialect in public, she corrected herself, "That's a magazine actually, but they really are as good as books!" I agreed.
Why?
I could have offered some answers to the question "why?" in 1996, which was when the storekeeper made that observation...but let me add another observation. I was digging into my magazine stash for material that might be used in a biography of the Grandmother of Modern Knitting, Elizabeth Zimmermann. As I scanned the table of contents in each issue I noticed my eyes coming to rest on some other names besides hers. Meg Swansen--that was logical. Swansen, still a feature writer at Vogue Knitting today and still an eye-catching model for her own work, at age 80, publicly said "I'm proud of being Elizabeth's daughter" and always advertised her work with that phrase. Barbara Walker? Well, she was close to EZ's age, or seemed so to my generation. Priscilla Gibson-Roberts? Linda Ligon? Sally Melville? What was going on here? Those were very different people who wrote very different books in different times and places, but my memory grouped them together.
It was not just that they'd been published in the same issues of Knitter's. Some other authors and designers who were published in the 1980s definitely were not in the same category: Kaffe Fassett, Patricia Roberts, Helene Rush...no, it was not that I hadn't liked and kept their books too. I had. If anything I've knitted more variations on their designs than I have variations on designs by that group I was associating with EZ.
Why?
Here's another thing I noticed. Although I was delighted to discuss "Eighties Sweaters" with readers who don't remember the 1980s, I also noticed myself feeling that the phrase is inaccurate and borders on being rude. Tactless, anyway. In the actual 1980s a lot of the sweaters people were knitting and wearing were revisions of patterns from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. (Relatively few patterns were published for hand knits in the 1960s and 1970s, but yup, in the 1980s yuppie knitters were revisiting those too!) The idea was that a sweater is simply a sweater, whether the fashion industry is marketing sweater looks this season or not. A handknitted sweater can be classified as well made or otherwise, as fitting or becoming to an individual wearer or otherwise, as a real heirloom that makes the knitter's relatives want to find out whether it can be preserved for centuries or as a piece of old clothes to be cut up and worn out as cleaning rags, but handknitting is not about fashion. Though it may be hoped that those of us who started knitting in the 1980s have learned and improved after thirty years of experience, though some of us are in fact now knitting things that we would have felt unable to knit in the 1980s, what we want to knit has not changed much over the years.
Oh, well, maybe a few things have changed. In the 1980s everyone wanted to knit, design, and wear sweaters with elaborate multicolored pictures, and sometimes textures and sewn-on trimmings; in the early 1990s this style peaked with pictures knitted in cotton in every color of the rainbow, especially bright red and green in "Christmas sweaters." By the late 1990s, the way some of those red and green cotton yarns, and some of those trimmings, reacted to machine laundering had generated the phrase "Ugly Holiday Sweaters." People my age are more cautious about making, buying, or wearing those "picture knits" because, though some of us still think they're cute, all of us have seen that it's hard to predict how well they'll hold up over the years, or how bad they will look before they become rags. I suppose you could call sweaters with large realistic pictures knitted in different colors and textures "Eighties Sweaters" if you really wanted to. But, darn it (and darning is what you have to do if you're determined to keep a picture-knitted piece when washing loosens a knot and those little chunks of colored cotton start to separate from one another), despite the caution we've learned about expecting multi-yarn knitting to last long, many people still enjoy knitting and using that kind of thing too.
Almost every kind of sweater in the known universe could be called an "Eighties Sweater"; somebody was probably wearing something like it in the 1980s. And, whether a sweater was knitted in the 1920s and proudly worn in the 1980s, or knitted in the 1980s from a 1947 design, or knitted from a 1980s pattern book in 2022, the fact of its being handknitted makes it...well, either a timeless classic, or an unsatisfactory sweater that tried to be a timeless classic and failed, but still, it's a sweater, not some kind of fashion item. In the handknitting community, nothing is more chic than a garment that is literally "dated," with the year knitted into it. I've knitted holiday hats with the year, and sometimes the name of the market, worked in as fairisle-stitch bands. They tend to sell the first time they're displayed. People who like handknitting tend to treasure items like that, and the earlier the date, the better.
Why?
When Knitter's was launched its staff demographics were not too unusual. The magazine was officially owned by a man--a lad, some would have said, considering those early photographs of baby-faced Alexis Xenakis, despite the college degree and military experience. (I was baby-faced too, and know what it is, and wouldn't have rubbed it in to Xenakis in the 1980s. I can mention it now that those of us who looked like children while we were entrepreneurial phenomena, in the 1980s, are such well preserved specimens of middle age.) Obviously a team of seasoned women made the magazine work.; "little Alexi" took great photos and got interviews with interesting people, but everyone knew that Knitter's was a production of Elaine Rowley, Dorothy Ratigan, and Meg Swansen. Then in the 1990s two of those editors retired, and Nancy Thomas moved up--it was already "up"!--from Vogue Knitting, brought in more of a New York attitude than some readers liked, but worked with the designers and editors who'd made Knitter's special. Nancy Thomas's version of Knitter's just grew and grew.
Other male publishers of knitting magazines recognized that most knitters are women and, despite the shrill angry way some left-wing feminist activists denounced needlework in the 1970s, most of us are feminists in a more serious and radical way than those leftist chicks ever were. We like to support and celebrate other women's work. Even when the original editors of all-female Interweave Knits retired and the magazine was sold to the more typical non-knitting male investors, those guys had enough sense to keep it edited by women.
Xenakis, however, really was a phenomenon, and thought he could get away with anything, even hiring a male editor for Knitter's. Rick Mondragon, a frequent contributor, took over as editor when Nancy Thomas retired. A few weeks later terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center, and the United States officially went into war mode, which had a depressing effect on Americans and American business generally. Other businesses recovered. Mondragon's version of Knitter's never did. Revisiting the magazine collection, I caught myself thinking of more recent issues in phrases like "Mondragon-blight set in" and "advanced stage of Mondragon-rot."
Men who knit in public are a distinctive breed. By and large I like them. It's not just that they tend to be excellent models, although they do. They can be any age, size, or color but they do a lot for whatever they wear. They come across as confident, natural, having soaked up enough attention for themselves and developed the grace of taking an interest in other people. They're likely to have learned to talk to women, really talk, not just spout a line that basically communicates "me-me-me and my little hormones." Even across the C-cups of those of us who are being towed through life by such. That's rare, and much appreciated. Because they're comfortable with themselves and with women, they have no trouble finding dates when they're single and also working and socializing with women without that obnoxious compulsive flirtation insecure men do, when they're taken. Well-known male knitters are of two kinds: the ones who are "gay" but not boring about it, since they call attention to their work rather than their sex lives, and the ones who are proud husbands and fathers, usually travelling in family groups with a wife and at least one adult child who also knit. The whole Knitting Universe, therefore, adores male knitters. Thus my husband, while he was still just a car-pool buddy modelling one of my sweaters at Stitches Fair, recognized that he had what it takes to be a male knitter-in-public, and soon became one.
Mondragon was not a typical male knitter. Nor was he an outstanding one like Xenakis or Kaffe Fassett. He was chubby and charmless, and designed more tacky sweaters than appealing ones, and never managed to grow a beard worth displaying in public, and never had enough sense to shave off the mess either. I never liked him; but tried to be charitable, as one does about other people's friends, until I looked back over the years and saw how much damage he'd done to Knitter's magazine.
Why?
Finding and transcribing all the content about the Zimmermann and Swansen family, I found more support for my original sense that there are two sources of influence on knitting today. They can look similar. They can flow together, and still, like two rivers tinged with different kinds of silt, maintain the distinction for many miles.
One of these sources of influence on knitting is practical. It comes from people who actually knit (and spin, dye, and sew) and who actually wear and use handknitted material. When these people sell material or patterns they often do very well, but their focus is on doing something they enjoy doing and do well.
The other source of influence is commercial. It comes from people who only sell material, patterns, or knitted products. For these people knitting is a potential source of profit (often an unsatisfying one) rather than an actual source of pleasure. As a result these people often try to market more and different products than the knitters and wearers want. They're the ones who pay attention to fashion, and fill pattern magazines with uninspired versions of basic designs knitted up in impractical "novelty" yarns.
Between 1985 and 1997 Knitter's was truly by and for knitters, a thoroughly practical magazine. That was what built it. The very first issues were thin and full of misprints, but what patterns they had were practical. As the magazine grew, knitters were invited to contribute patterns that fitted into themes. Some of the results were silly--but "witty knits" was trendy in the 1980s. Mostly the results were patterns that people enjoyed knitting and wearing. When I look at the patterns in Elaine Rowley's Knitter's, today, I find myself thinking "Without the color pictures..." and "Without the bobbles..." and then, "...I'd still wear that, or I know someone who would." Most of the patterns call for specific amounts of specific commercial yarn, but Gibson-Roberts and other contributors always reminded knitters that, if we didn't find the right yarn in the shop, we could try spinning it for ourselves. Yarn amounts were calculated in yardage rather than weight.
In the late 1990s, when Nancy Thomas took over, the magazine grew explosively by adding more commercial input. Pages were filled with instructions for knitting "basics" that real knitters already knew how to knit. Such "designs" had appeared in Elaine Rowley's Knitter's--as advertisements, which worked for knitters. I don't think there's anything wrong with knitting a simple plain-stitch scarf that celebrates this season's colors in this season's "novelty" yarn. Sometimes that approach to knitting is fun. But I don't need to pay for any more paper to tell me how it's done. I might be more likely to do it after seeing a picture of how someone else put the colors together, but I can already figure out that they would have cast on about forty stitches and knitted every stitch plain for about two yards. By 1993 I was inspecting the other knitting magazines to make sure they included patterns that had something to teach me, not merely "basics" in "novelty" yarns.
Knitter's maintained the level of progress it had reached, throughout its history, in one way. Before Knitter's, yarn manufacturers had tended not to disclose how many yards of yarn went into a skein sold by weight. Substituting yarn? They just didn't recommend that, not ever, not under any circumstances. If the shop didn't stock the yarn the pattern specified, the manufacturers wanted knitters to buy a new pattern to knit with the new yarn. In the 1980s some manufacturers grudgingly sold wool shops lists of yardage that could be used to make sure the storekeeper recommended the customer buy something from the same manufacturer. Elizabeth Zimmermann had little patience with that sort of commercial nonsense, although she sold her own brands of yarn. She encouraged knitters to calculate how many yards they would need to knit thinner or thicker yarns in the shapes or patterns they wanted, to be their own designers--or even spinners.
In other ways Mondragon pushed the magazine off that balance Nancy Thomas had maintained, into the commercial approach that made the other magazines so inferior to books. Right away Meg Swansen, Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, Lily Chin, and the other contributors of "On Designing"articles disappeared from the magazine. Articles, generally, were pushed out by advertisements, and advertisements-disguised-as-patterns for "basics." Knitter's designers continued to supply designs that did offer something an experienced knitter might have paid for...but often it was those intarsia pictures of which we were all becoming wary, seeing what was becoming of all those Christmas sweaters.
I collected Knitter's faithfully up to Issue #100. I'd started around #35 and had hunted down a majority of the issues printed before that. By about #70 I'd recognized that I was buying Knitter's to complete a collection rather than to read the news from the designers who'd become pen friends I met at Stitches Fair--most of them were no longer with Mondragon's version of Knitter's. Of course these knitters weren't young; some of them had stated intentions of retiring from designing in the 1990s. Of course the knitting universe needed to give younger knitters their share of attention. But somehow Mondragon was failing to draw out the talents of those younger knitters, encouraging them to publish designs that don't work for actual people.
Part of it, I remember well, was Mondragon's obsession with sleeveless vests. Whether because he never mastered the intricacies of knitting sleeves and resented that most knitters do, or because he was too fat to fit into jackets and sweaters with sleeves, or both, he encouraged designers to publish more designs for chunky sleeveless vests. Well, news flash: a lot of people won't wear a vest. I don't wear vests. I don't see the use of them. If you're motivated to wear something to keep you warm, arms need more insulation than the heart does. If you're motivated to wear something for looks, a sleeveless vest will really make you look shorter and wider. I don't recall even Diana Spencer wanting to look that much shorter and wider. I have redesigned a few printed patterns for vests into jackets with sleeves, always feeling that I was paying other people to do work they were then failing to do and leaving to me.
So Knitter's continued to become a bulkier magazine, printed on heavier paper, wider sheets of paper, which was another thing I remember disliking. When you carry knitting about, if you're following a printed pattern, you want to protect that printed pattern from wear and tear. I like to fold a magazine up inside a binder or a hardcover book. Later issues of Knitter's stuck out. Bigger pages were a commercial decision. They looked distinctive, they allowed bigger pictures to be printed, they made it harder for knitters to photocopy patterns. (Publishers feared that knitters would photocopy patterns and sell them to people who would then fail to buy their own copies of printed books. This actually happened with more popular genres of literature but I'm not aware of anyone actually doing it with knitting patterns.) Bigger pages did not work for knitters.
Then there was the poverty factor. After Internet writing became my primary income source I obviously could not afford to collect yarn or magazines any more. I acquired new pattern magazines by leading customers into shops and inviting them to commission pieces of knitting from the magazines and books I wanted. Knitter's had always been an easy sell but increasingly, when people looked at Mondragon's commercialized version of Knitter's, they were saying "Does it haaaff to be this magazine? These other magazines are all cheaper. Let's see if their patterns for (hats, sweaters, blankets, whatever) are just as good or better," and after Issue #100 they almost always did say that. On several occasions people bought me hardcover books, rather than the commercialized Knitter's.
I have two issues of Knitter's that came after #100. Each contained one pattern that somebody wanted. I don't know that all the other late issues of Knitter's lacked patterns that appealed to customers, though, because the stores were ordering fewer copies of Knitter's. Fewer or none.
How many of your marketing and even production decisions are practical, Gentle Readers, and how many are commercial? Could an overemphasis on the commercial aspect of your business actually be sabotagng the practical aspect? Could immediate profits be bringing your long-term profitability down?
No comments:
Post a Comment