knittofit.co.uk

Personal philosophy on knitting

Knitting, knitted textiles and knitwear
Duing my experience as a designer in industry I developed my belief that understanding knitted structures is fundamental to successful, innovative and aesthetically pleasing knit design, which has resulted in a lifelong passion. Believing this excellence can onlly be achieved through practise and acquiring and applying analytical and crtitical skills has caused me to never cease learning and indeed to embark on this PhD research. My philosophy creates a distinction between 'jumpers' and designed knitwear that uses the qualities and behaviours of the knitted stitch to enhance the body shape, and add texture and interest to surface pattern. That is not to say that jumpers should be ignored, rather that they should and can be crafted through understanding into more wearable and desirable items. Which ties in with the new idea of 'slow fashion'. Instead of buying an article that is useable for only a short time, whether because of design or manufacture or a combination of both, garments should have enduring qualities that encourage longevity of use, albiet with a higher inital price tag. These can be physical e.g. the article fits you well and you feel comfortable and know you look good in it, or it might be that you make some contribution to its design or manufacture so there is imbued connection with it beyond that of purchasing a garment 'off thepeg'. This could be compared loosely to the emotional connection that some women assign to their wedding dress.

Body shape
As a young person finding desirable, affordable clothes was a challenge and this did not change with age. Hovering between a UK 16 and 20, in the doldrums between ‘normal’ sizes and ‘outsizes’ for most of my life, finding huge differences between retailers ‘standard’ dimensions, I made a large proportion of my own clothing and rarely bought anything that did not need altering to fit. Yet there were women everywhere I asked bemoaning the lack of well fitting clothing and limited choices in larger sizes. Why do manufacturers make clothing for larger sizes with proportionally lengthened sleeves?
A bigger tummy or hips doesn't mean you have longer arms, not all size 18 women are 6 foot tall with long arms. The bust is also an area of contention, bigger sized women don't always have larger cup sizes, so the darting (if present), lies in the wrong place. I've already mentioned the often seen lack of darting, however darts add 3d shape, and bigger women have a shape, they don't want to wear bags, even a straight (or even better, slightly flared) tunic looks and FITS better with darts.
It was these forces and experiences that led me to undertake this PhD research. Women’s bodies are a strong Western cultural symbol, they are used to sell consumer goods, and to validate our femininity in a narrow ‘acceptable’ range of looks and sizes, they are used to define us in an uncomplimentary way; ‘fat’, ‘skinny, ‘flabby’, ‘saggy’, all are bodily descriptors, and yet women’s bodies do not appear to have been researched as shape divorced from these connotations. There have been medical and anthropological studies of body size and shape, but not in the context of shape rather than size in relationship to clothing. This may be because clothing is linked to fashion which is considered frivolous, not the subject for ‘serious’ research, even though the majority of the world wear clothing and the Western world is obsessed with fashion.

Future thoughts
Having had a commercial background I understand the principles of mass manufacture and the cost of developing new or different sizes in garments, but with the advent of new thinking at the moment with the financial crisis, might this not be a time to start thinking about the way we buy or clothing and why we buy what we buy?