Knitwork: Creativity and the Manufacture of British Designer Knitwear in the 1980s

Abstract

This article deals with the production of hand-knitted fashionable clothing in the British knitwear sector during the so-called designer boom of the 1980s. Drawing on a variety of sources including contemporary newspapers, investigative accounts, television documentaries, and instruction manuals, alongside newly-collected oral testimony from knitwear designers and their knitting outworkers (knitworkers), it explores creativity and the co-dependencies of manufacture and design in this sector. It challenges the pervading stereotypes that have long haunted the homework sector in British fashion, and argues that in knitwork, knitters have powerful creative agency over the clothes they produce. It demonstrates that far from being mute and obedient producers, knitworkers have made a significant contribution to the history of British knitwear, not only as skilled and talented makers but as influencers of its design heritage too. In this way, this article reconceptualises our understanding of what is meant by creativity in manual production and offers new ways of illuminating the significant creative exchange between maker and designer which until now has been neglected in the literature on both homeworking and the history of knitting more generally.