Yipes, stripes!
That King Cole Footsie yarn I mentioned in an earlier post looked as if it had everything going for it. The colours are lovely; it's a quarter the price of the Tencel blend I used for the yellow-mix socks, but it's still vegan; it's nice and soft, and very pleasant to work with; the stitch definition is excellent; and so on. But. You knew there was going to be a "but", didn't you?
It's very difficult to tell a proper random from a modern self-striping yarn just by looking at the ball. So, of course, I thought I'd got a random. Unfortunately, by the time I'd knitted the toe boxes it was clear that this was not at all what I had, and I'm not doing cables on stripes. It just looks too busy. (You do very occasionally see it on knitting patterns, but in those cases the stripes are deliberately knitted in and not a result of the yarn; it's usually on a larger scale, so the stripes are wide enough that you can see the cables properly; and, honestly, I still steer well clear.) So, having worked out where all the cables were going to go, I had to scrap all that and switch to boring old ribbing. I mean, I suppose I could have done a lace stitch, but I'm not mad about lace stitches for winter socks. Maybe for summer, but even then only maybe. On the plus side, ribbing has so much stretch that they'll undoubtedly be a stonking good fit; but even so, I was a bit disappointed.
So I e-mailed King Cole, and I said to them that I thought this was basically a very good yarn, but if I'd known it was self-striping I wouldn't have bought it. Could they possibly consider either a) making a sock yarn in a proper random that would work well with cables, or, failing that, at least b) clearly labelling the Footsie so that people know what they're getting? I got a very nice e-mail back the next morning (I e-mailed them fairly late in the evening), and they thanked me for my detailed and constructive feedback - of course, I had told them at some length what I really liked about the yarn - and promised to see what they could do about at least one of the two things I'd suggested. Well done, King Cole. They're a good company.
One of the things I pointed out in this e-mail was that "fashionable" is not necessarily always the same thing as "popular". I didn't expand on that very much in the e-mail, because I didn't want to write a treatise, but I did mention that the lady at Vegan Yarns had been asked to do self-striping yarns because they were fashionable and then discovered they didn't sell, so she stopped doing them. (She says they're a massive hassle to do in any case. I'll take her word for it, as I know nothing about yarn dyeing.) So I'd like to talk a little more about that here.
The problem with fashion is that it's top-down. You and I and all the people we know don't ever get to decide what is going to be fashionable. That's not what fashion means. What we decide is what is going to be popular. The people who make decisions about fashion are top designers sitting in ateliers in Paris or London or New York or wherever, and they do it months or even years in advance. They don't have some way of seeing into the future; nobody ever gazed into a crystal ball (or even a computer simulation) and announced that in two years' time everyone would suddenly be raving about a colour called Post-modern Pink. No. They make it all up out of their heads. They go through the Pantone catalogue, they find a colour, they think, "oh, that's nice, let's give it a catchy name," and Post-modern Pink is born. Then they design some item and decide that that's going to be the fashion at that time, and they arrange for it to be produced in black, navy, red, and Post-modern Pink. And they send press releases about it to all the top fashion magazines so that they can write breathless articles saying things like "Pssst! This is what's going to be hot next spring, and make sure you get it in the season's essential colour, Post-modern Pink!"
It's a total sham, and it plays on the fact that "fashion" actually used to mean "what people like to wear", and most people haven't yet caught up with the fact that it hasn't meant that for a very long time.
Now, to be fair, sometimes it does catch on and actually become popular. I can remember exactly when low-rise trousers started doing that. I went into a shop for a pair of trousers, tried on a pair in my approximate size, and came out of the fitting room scowling. The assistant asked if they were the wrong size.
"No," I said. "The size isn't the problem. They're just so badly cut that they don't even come up to my waist!"
Clearly on that occasion I was in a minority; if everyone had thought like that, they'd never have got anywhere. But most people liked them, and, to be fair, there are a very few people that they suit. They've become so much the norm that regular trousers are now referred to as "high-waisted", which is confusing, because then what do you call actual high-waisted trousers? Thankfully it is still possible to get regular trousers; the low-rise ones don't look good on anyone with any kind of stomach at all, and in my case I've got two (side by side, because of the surgery scar down the middle) plus Sibyl's bag.
Much more often, whatever it is that the fashion designers push at us catches on very briefly because it's something new and different, but very shortly afterwards everyone looks at it and goes "what on earth was I thinking when I bought that thing?!". Exhibit A, m'lud - winklepickers. They had a brief spell of popularity... I'm not sure when, but I think shortly before I was born; at any rate Bernard Cribbins wrote a very funny song about them ("I've Got Winklepicker Shoes Blues"). Then they resurged, even more briefly, around 2010 if my memory serves me. I recall going into my local shopping centre at the time in search of a decent pair of winter boots, and this rather hapless shop assistant showed me a pair of winklepickers.
"And why would I want to wear those?" I enquired, mildly.
"Fashion?" she suggested.
"Do I look as if I want fashion?"
She got the message. I walked out of that shop with a good sturdy pair of boots. Within literally a few weeks of that incident, there wasn't a winklepicker to be seen, either in the shops or on anyone's feet. There must be stacks of them still mouldering at the backs of the wardrobes of various regretful purchasers.
And then, of course, there are the Post-modern Pinks of this world, where, no matter how much puff is applied in advance, once it finally comes out everyone just looks at it and goes "nah". And serve the designers jolly well right for thinking they can tell us all what to wear. I had more than my fill of that when I was a child; right up to the age of eleven I had no choice at all regarding what I wore, and got told off for asking to be allowed to choose. Even after that, my mother was still in the habit of buying me clothes without consulting me and then expecting me to like them because she'd chosen them. I always had to pretend I did, because it was that sort of family. So you can probably see where my strong aversion to fashion - as opposed to things actually becoming popular naturally - springs from.
Meanwhile, back in the present, I'm still stuck with the self-striping yarn. I've got two more colourways of it. I wonder what I'm going to do for those pairs of socks that isn't necessarily ribbing?
