Knitwits

All photos by Mark Fina, courtesy of Degen

After stumbling across Degen knitwear on various blogs and Tumblrs, I had the surprise pleasure of stumbling across the magical designer, Lindsay Degen, in real life, while visiting her studio mate.  Lindsay shares an inspiring space in the sprawling Brooklyn Navy Yards with my friend Becca McCharen, the designer behind Chromat.  It is not often that I come across exciting new knitwear designers, and it thrilled me to see Lindsay's work up close and personal, as it is truly one of a kind.  Using a mix of hand knitting and crochet, as well as machine knit pieces made on looms in her studio, Lindsay creates colorful, tongue in cheek, and downright absurd attire using the most traditional and age-old techniques and methods.  While your average knitwear designer's repertoire includes a range of sweaters, socks, scarves and mittens, Degen presents peculiar jersey shirts with boob holes, crochet nipple pasties, and underwear with wooly fake pubes stitched on the front.  Even the Degen version of mittens are a slightly off creation: half mittens and half gloves.

Anyway, the inspiration behind the Fall 2012 Degen collection, Ask Tell, is explained in the lookbook, which I've posted in full here--something I rarely do, but I truly love each and every piece.  What I'm most excited for is not even knit at all; Lindsay is collaborating with Converse on a line of platform sneakers, which you can get a peek at here.

-Tiffany

Knots and Cords

I am always on the search for new knits, and I was immediately struck by Derek Lawlor's intricate creations. Lawlor, who is known for his unique technique of incorporating waxed cord onto his knits in patterns, designs sculptural and visually striking pieces.  For Fall 2012, he incorporated a loose ladder pattern, that resembled a refined version of the shredded knits that spread across blogs like wildfire a few years ago.  These ladder knits differ in that they are very carefully applied, and even if they have a deconstructed and slightly dishabille affect, they're juxtaposed against very structured and refined knit patterns.  There's a striking contrast between the two elements, and the overall result is somewhat wabi-sabi.  Everything in this collection is perfectly imperfect.

-Tiffany

SWE YORK CITY

All photos by Scott Lowe

My move from New York to Sweden unfortunately coincided with a mass exodus of my Swedish friends in the opposite direction.  While my friend Lars Andersson did not relocate to New York very recently, he is one of the many who moved to the city to study, and ended up settling down to stay for good.  Even though he never finished his degree at F.I.T., he still managed to carve a niche in the fashion world with his dark, dreamy, and highly labor intensive knits.  In his work, Lars has managed to fuse two very distinct and fundamental sides of Sweden, which seem diametrically opposed.  His hand-knit work draws on one of the nation's many homely traditions, and conjures up the comforting, cozy, and grandmotherly aspect of Sweden that is commonly peddled at the tourist shops lining the streets of Gamla Stan.  At the same time, his dark, and subculturally influenced designs harken towards the mysterious and haunting countryside, while simultaneously touching on contemporary Sweden's more recent love for progressive fashion, draping silhouettes, and a predominately black/grey color palette.  In the Lars Andersson Fall 2012 collection, I see both old Sweden and new Sweden at once, inflected, of course, with a bit of New York.

-Tiffany

Dreams of Electronic Sheep

I'm always keeping an eye out for fun knitwear lines, and Electronic Sheep is a new favorite.  Designed in the U.K. and produced in Greece, the colorful and illustrative patterns manage to convey entire stories using the medium of scarves, hats, hoods, and knit capes.  For the fall collection, the theme was "The House of Many Mansions." The patterns, including overflowing fruitbaskets, distorted tartans, and roaming peacocks, are meant to evoke a life of plenty, as well as the sense of the shabby glamour of a reclusive eccentric along the lines of Edie Bouvier Beale.  I'm particularly obsessed with the knit capes, which were made in collaboration with the awesomely dressecd British DJ duo, The Broken Hearts (make sure to take a peek at their photo gallery).

-Tiffany

Warmi Up!

While surfing the loveliest e-shop on the internet, The Moon and Mars (maybe I'm a bit biased since we sell there), I came across the most amazing new line of fun, colorful and kooky knits, Warmi.  Designed by Sylvia Toth in Paris, and then hand knit in the towns of Tausa and Sutatausa in Colombia by artisans, the line combines traditional Latin American textile craftsmanship with Parisian fashion-forwardness.  While I love the cartoonish depictions of snakes, birds, and other fuzzy four-legged creatures, I also appreciate Warmi's dedication to the craft of knitting.  Each of the Colombian artisans is featured in a small bio on the website, and all of them sign the pieces that they create.  Additionally, Warmi encourages people to knit their own pieces, selling kits so you can get started on a leopard-print armband project, and perhaps move on to more complex things from there.  Warmi has certainly inspired me to pick up my own set of needles soon--maybe I'll knit up my own phantasmagoric creature to keep me warm this winter.

-Tiffany

Cat and Mouse Game

I am about to move to a much colder climate, and as I pack up all my worldly possessions, I'm wondering what I'm going to be wearing though the long Swedish winter.  Fall is fun, winter is oppressive.  However, looking at Lars Andersson's latest video lookbook has made me feel a bit more inspired.  Lars is Swedish, so he must know the old adage, "There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."  Therefore he provides a perfect way to counter the elements in style: layer upon layer of thick, lush, heavy knits.  In his video, two models chase each other across the rooftops of New York wearing his dramatic creations, which have the practicality of warmth, yet are still elegant, moody, dark, and romantic.  Hoping to master this look by the time deep dark December rolls around.

-Tiffany

Darn The Boozer

The British menswear label Sibling always has a cheeky take on classic knitwear, and this season they drew their inspiration from a London pub-crawl, hitting up some of their favorite pubs for design motifs. It's the kind of boozy-influence that guys like my husband can relate to, with direct references to famous drinking spots. The Red Lion's emblem became a fantastic embroidered embellishment on a red sweater, and the knight of George & Dragon became a fair-isle knit motif (mixed with crossed cigarettes and dragons for a modern update), in addition to inspiring knits with armor-like shoulder pieces and leather buckles. Each season, Sibling collaborates with a different artist, and for Fall they worked with Pure Evil, who created the Pandas Rock! image of Pandas done up in Kiss makeup, for an additionally humorous and subversive touch. While the pieces are designed for men, there are plenty of things for the ladies to steal--after all most of the women I know are just as likely to go boozing as their male counterparts.

Publish Post

-Tiffany

Rive Gauche

Half of my friends have jetted off to Paris for market, and I'm incredibly jealous that I'm not joining them. My last trip in January was way too short, and left me with a craving for all things French: macaroons, escargot, and of course, that quintessential French chic that all Parisian women possess. I'm not particularly chic or put-together (more thrown together), but Parisian ladies make me want to try a little harder. Catherine Malandrino's collections are always based on that very idea of Parisian chic, and this season she presented some of the staples of the look: elongated silhouettes, luxurious outerwear and furs, men's inspired trousers, all mixed with flashes of fishnet. Malandrino's knits are always one of her strongpoints, and one of my favorite pieces was a body-hugging grey long-sleeve dress, which looks just as well suited for the streets of Manhattan as the Left Bank of Paris.

-Tiffany

Road Warrior

Earlier today, Christina was telling me about a documentary she watched about how the world will run out of fuel in the next twenty years, and how society will have to learn how to transition without falling into complete and total chaos and anarchy. This news, combined with all the recent reports of dead bird falling from the sky, is making me feel a bit like Chicken Little. The apocalypse is a whole lot more romantic when it doesn't seem like it's imminently looming at your doorstep. Nonetheless, Frank Tell manages to bring back some of the fantasy associated with a world with no laws and no boundaries. Inspired by movies like Mad Max and La Jetee (one of my favorite films of all time), the designer became interested in the concept of entropy as an agent of change. He made his silhouettes longer, looser, and increasingly distorted, and chose to use rarefied fabrics like lace and chiffon in a raw and distressed fashion. The final result is a lot better looking than I imagine true post-apocalypse to be (which would probably be more akin to the movie Blindness), and my favorite pieces were the shaggy moss green knits that resembled living walls. When The End of Days does come, I hope I will at least be scavenging for food and water while wearing Frank Tell.

-Tiffany