Knitters of Yore

Trust Woman's Mirror to be on top of the burning issues of the day - that day being some point in the mid-1960s. From this fascinating artifact we can discover the knitwear preferences of a host of household names. Some of these are now forgotten, but a select few have become showbusiness legends. Definitely in the latter category is Peter Finch, the Australian actor who would become the first performer ever to win a posthumous Oscar for his barnstorming turn in the 1976 film Network . Of more importance than this from the point of view of Kntters of Yore is that Finch can't resist a pink jumper. Although he never attracted the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, dancer and general purpose celebrity Lionel Blair remained a firm favourite of the British public over a long career until his death in 2001 at the age of 92. One riddle remained throughout Lionel's life - what would a girl have to do to attract Blair's roving eye? If only they had loo...

  Our chap here is displaying style cues of the post-war Beatniks at that point when the style had been so thoroughly integrated into the mainstream that elements of it morphed into Mod style and the menswear revolution that we now know as ‘smart casual’. This opens up the chance for me to discuss one of the favourite subjects of Knitters of Yore: how fashion spreads from the streets and is assimilated into the mainstream. This process was memorably termed by George Melly ‘Revolt into Style’, with the opposite process, from the drawing boards of elite designers to everyday life, probably best termed by Tom Wolfe as ‘From Bauhaus to Our House’ (the latter was about architecture, but seems appropriate in this context). Anyway, I digress. The Beakniks might seem a mild and harmless development now, but they were look upon with a mixture of scorn and horror by large elements of Britain's ever-conservative press when their influence began to be felt in the UK. Check out this review of J...