Rise of the male knitter
City boys and celebrities cast on Eleanor Steafel
Acouple of times a week, Milli Abrams watches as a strange ritual takes place outside her British yarn shop. Depending on the day, a shifty- looking off-duty construction worker or police officer will appear on the opposite side of the street from her shop, Tribe in Richmond upon Thames, and perform a drive-by.
Glancing in as they stroll past the shop to check if anyone is inside, they will keep walking if they spy a n y customers, “but if the shop is empty they’ll come in and buy some yarn.” They are the “closet knitters,” Abrams says — keen hobbyists and loyal customers who love to knit but keep it all a secret from their colleagues.
“There is such a stigma around [men knitting] still,” says Abrams.
This small band of secret customers forms part of a rush of new male knitters coming through her door in recent months. “This year in lockdown we’ve seen a lot more younger guys doing it,” she says.
“They’re making chunky knits for their girlfriends and their mums, but they’re mainly picking it up in order to do something mindful and so they can put their phones down.
“When we first opened [in 2018] men were making practical things like laptop bags, or socks and not a lot else, but now it seems to be a lot more about mindfulness and just the practice of doing it.”
Knitting, much like bread making, has experienced a surge in popularity this year as people have attempted to channel their anxiety and newfound free time into mindful hobbies that pull them away from a screen.
John Lewis reported a big jump in haberdashery sales after the first lockdown in the spring, while online retailer Hobbycraft revealed searches for “knitting” were up by 400 per cent.
Meanwhile, social media has been flooded with people showing off their knitting projects. Even Olympic diver Tom Daley has plunged into the trend, posting pictures to a new Instagram account for his creations. Over lockdown, Daley produced an impressive collection, including a tea cosy, a sweater, a Christmas decoration and a poncho for his two-year-old son, Robbie.
“I started knitting at the beginning of lockdown and have been obsessed ever since,” he said. “I have started to crochet now also!”
Former Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood also admitted recently to being a prolific knitter. “I used to hold the spool of wool for my mum,” he revealed on the Tea with Twiggy podcast. “She taught me the plain stitch and I still do it today. I knit endless scarves now.”
Instead of booze and drugs, then, the 73-year-old drinks copious amounts of coffee and knits, telling Twiggy: “I’m an espresso man. But that is an old leftover habit from rehab. I couldn’t do anything else so coffee was the thing.”
If a Rolling Stone can freely admit to knitting, why the embarrassment around the topic? Abrams says that, though the numbers of male customers in her shop has soared, men still tend to stay way from her knitting classes. “Guys aren’t as keen on getting direction,” she says. “Before lockdown every third class we’d have a guy, sometimes really young, sometimes retired. But not many.”
Lloyd Burr took up knitting in earnest in lockdown as a way to stay busy. A 33- year- old journalist who lives in London and works for a New Zealand TV station, Burr started knitting merely as a hobby but soon f ound himself making scarves for friends and later strangers who came across his Instagram account. He has made more than 60 now.
“It is intimidating when you go into these shops with all these people who are really good at knitting, and they’re all women, they’re all nannas or older women,” he says.
“You’ve just got to be confident and explain what you want. Even the people who work in these shops, who are always women, have a bit of a chuckle [ when you come in], so there’s definitely a stigma there.”
He gets some strange sideways looks on public transit, and is constantly expecting someone to take his picture “so they can ( post it) and be like ‘ oh my God, there’s a man knitting.’ ”
Burr has made his peace with the relative novelty of a man in his 30s knitting, and now gets so much out of it personally that he only charges for the wool and the postage when selling his scarves. He is even trying to convince male friends back home in New Zealand to allow him to teach them. After all, he jokes, “we’ve got 40 million sheep.”