Handcrafted Style: Why We Crave It within the Digital Age

Brooklyn-based designer Ulla Johnson, whose mother collected Eastern European embroidery, describes herself as “a child of the ’70s.” She grew up in a decade smitten with crafts but saw interest in them dwindle in the ’80s and ’90s. “There was a time when I wondered if people read the labels and knew where their clothes were made, but I think that’s changing… [People are] appreciative of something that is handmade,” she said.

Like Ms. Johnson, Zoe Latta of bicoastal brand Eckhaus Latta identifies strongly with handwork. “I went into fashion design because I was really attracted by the social, collaborative, problem-solving aspect of it—of being literally hands-on,” she said. The results, though, are sometimes misunderstood: Eckhaus Latta’s signature spiderweb knits have been described as crocheted. (They’re knitted.)

Not Available at Craft Fairs

Techniques from embroidery to cross-stitching are infiltrating legitimate fashion

Fashion has fetishized the handmade ever since the sewing machine enabled mass production and conferred special status on anything handcrafted; that’s why the mystique of haute couture—which can employ hand-sewing, embroidery and appliqué—endures. The cozier arts of knitting and crochet appear less frequently in fashion history, but they’re not unheard of: Elsa Schiaparelli, one of the 20th century’s wittiest designers, got her start in 1927 with a hand-knit black-and-white trompe l’oeil sweater.

Although Schiap herself couldn’t knit—she hired Armenian refugees in Paris to execute her designs—plenty of women could, and even the well-off made their own sweaters, as Nancy Mitford describes in her 1945 novel “The Pursuit of Love.” Her upper-crust characters knit jumpers that “go with” but don’t “match” their tweeds. It was the counterculture of the 1960s, however, that made handicrafts, particularly crochet, a truly broad cultural phenomenon.

Compared with knitting and weaving, whose ancient origins are backed up by archaeological finds, crochet has murkier roots. Some sources suggest it’s related to earlier forms of embroidery or lace-making, but the most reliable evidence places its beginnings in 19th-century Europe.

The afghans and tea cozies that early crochet enthusiasts turned out later inspired hippies to take up the craft themselves. The mainstream fashion industry took note, transforming crochet, especially in the form of baby-doll dresses, into a trend in the 1960s. But the more rarefied end of the market never fully embraced crochet. As Women’s Wear Daily sniffed in 1970, “suspicion of loving hands at home…keeps most crochets out of the high fashion category.”

That didn’t stop crochet from being enthusiastically adopted by home crafters, whose numbers exploded in the 1970s, when ideas championed by the back-to-the-land movement like self-sustainability and preindustrial skills filtered into suburbia. A 1973 article in Woman’s Day called “Anyone Can Do the Granny Square,” which ran to 23 pages, was not atypical.

Handicrafts were seen as a way to combat anxieties about technology. “Revolt against the computers: Swing to hand-knit looks and crochet,” commanded Diana Vreeland, the influential editor of Vogue from 1963 to 1971. That’s still true—crocheting can be seen as the anti-scrolling—but today, when about 38 million Americans actively knit and crochet, we’re aware of other reasons to pick up a ball of yarn. Like yoga or meditation, needlework’s repetitive action has been shown to induce a relaxed state, and can lower heart rate and blood pressure.

Designers have an added incentive to produce handmade items: Mass brands can’t easily imitate them. Joseph Altuzarra, who has been crocheting, knitting and needlepointing since childhood, said, “Fast fashion…has pushed me to look to ways to make clothes that are not copyable by a machine, that are unique in their imperfections, as well.”

Fashion will always put a premium on what’s in short supply. In the pre-Industrial era, when labor was cheap and plentiful but fabric was expensive, the cost of a dress was almost entirely in its material. Today, when we are surrounded by clothes so inexpensive we treat them as disposable, having someone, be it a woman’s collective in Peru or an artisan in Italy, make something by hand is what can push up the cost of a garment. “Loving hands at home” may have been too domestic for high fashion in 1970, but people spent more time at home then, with fewer distractions. Now that we work longer and harder, domesticity, whether it’s in a packaged meal kit or a pre-made hand-knit, is all the rage.