Newlyweds lined their living rooms with monsteras. Teenagers posted TikToks of their daily Dalgona coffees. Nearly everyone raised a sourdough starter.
Such pandemic pastimes enabled those stuck at home to channel their restlessness into something creative. And while most have fallen out of vogue, knit and crochet — whose tactile and slow-moving qualities comforted many during quarantine — seem to have stuck. Now, a new generation of fabric artists is navigating how to sustain their craft in an eagerly progressing world.
But it isn’t the first time.
The earliest Arts and Crafts Movement originated as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Concerned that mass machine production was causing a decline in the quality of goods, proponents of the movement called for the return of traditional craft methods.
British textile designer William Morris, who is often credited as the movement’s founder, argued that design reform was also a matter of social reform.
“We are right to long for intelligent handicraft to come back to the world which it once made tolerable amidst war and turmoil and uncertainty of life,” Morris wrote in the November 1888 issue of The Fortnightly Review.
A second craft revival coincided with the hippie movement of the 1960s — when a countercultural movement that encouraged artistic freedom again inspired people toward handicraft — and now, a third revival seems to have grown out of the pandemic, said Melissa Leventon, who teaches fashion history and theory at California College of the Arts.
While socially isolated during quarantine, Leventon said, many looked to arts and crafts as a “fulfilling escape, as well as a way to try and reach out and touch someone.”
The 2021 Arts and Crafts Consumer Market Report, published by UK-based market research firm Mintel, reported that the arts and crafts market saw a significant boost in 2020 as people became more interested in affordable at-home activities that reduced their stress from the pandemic.
Young consumers dominated sales.
They also shared their products on social media platforms, especially TikTok and Instagram. Those posts then snowballed into a full-fledged online community.
Olivia Ziegler, Stanford sophomore and owner of the small business Ollie Crochet, began crocheting early into quarantine, mostly out of boredom.
“I consider myself to be a very creative person, but it was on TikTok that I started to get a lot of crochet content,” Ziegler said. Unlike most crochet-learners, she bypassed the basics and went straight into recreating a bag she saw online. One Michael’s trip and a few YouTube tutorials later, she was hooked.
“From there, I just never stopped,” she said.
Lora Burnett, who manages The East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, a nonprofit resale art supply store based in Oakland, said that since she started working at the store in 2021, she’s seen a younger demographic becoming increasingly interested in craft practices.
“People in their twenties and thirties are wanting to knit and crochet and learn how to do these kinds of handicraft things that were probably in fashion because of necessity in prior decades and prior ages,” Burnett said. “But now there’s that resurgence,” she added, and it wasn’t born of necessity.
Ziegler said she was drawn to crochet because it was practical as well as creative, allowing her to make art that was specifically designed to be wearable. It was also a welcome disruption to high-school life, which was about being as productive as possible, at all times.
“Crochet, I think, is against that, because it takes a long time. It can’t be mechanized,” Ziegler said. “It’s kind of counterintuitive to what I had been taught about being efficient, and also that you have to be really good at something for it to be worthwhile.”
Still, Ziegler’s skills have improved to the extent that she now sells her products. Her bestsellers include an Evil Eye-patterned tote bag and a strawberry rim bucket hat.
“I’ve gotten a number of people saying they would pay whatever I wanted to charge just to get that hat, which is kind of crazy,” Ziegler said.
Ollie Crochet began merely as a means to clear out excess projects Ziegler no longer had room for, so profit was not a priority. But after receiving an overwhelmingly positive response at a flea market hosted by Stanford’s fashion club FashionX, she began to feel more tension around pricing.
Ziegler has always aimed to keep her products affordable for college students, but this often means lowballing her work, which she said several of her friends have encouraged her to avoid.
Tyah Amoy, a Stanford senior who also runs their own small-batch crochet shop, similarly struggles with pricing their pieces — especially knowing their competitors are fast fashion corporations profiting off of cheap labor. If Amoy were to compete price-wise with online giants like Shein, they said they wouldn’t even be making minimum wage.
In the modern marketplace, where consumers underestimate the time-intensive labor that garment-making requires, and prefer cheaply priced items to ethically-made ones, Amoy has grappled with the value of their work.
“It makes you want to negotiate your prices down, or at least it makes me feel like my work isn’t as valuable,” they said.
The low value ascribed to fabric art has remained consistent for centuries, in large part because it is a women-dominated practice.
“In the West, we have long associated fashion with femininity and with frivolity — it’s yet another of the ways that women are sort of pigeonholed as second-class citizens in Western culture,” Leventon said. Each new generation has tried to break this cycle, Leventon added, but “ultimately, we still live in a patriarchal society, and women artists, and women’s art, women’s interests, just are not valued as highly.”
Amoy recalls first learning crochet from their Caribbean grandmother, and thus has always revered it as a Black women’s art. However, they are conscious of how fabric art’s association with femininity has also made it difficult for its practitioners to be taken seriously.
“People view it as like a women’s art form — something you do at home, and not something that you can take into a professional sphere,” Amoy said. Hence, among the already limited arts grants offered to early-career artists, very few are allotted to fabric artists.
Since the first craft revival, fabric artists have struggled with where to locate themselves and their practices; the nomenclature wobbles between art and craft, occupation and hobby, fashion design and handicraft.
“The water started getting muddied about what it was very early,” Leventon said. “The term ‘wearable art,’ which was the first way it was designated in any attempt to identify it as a genre, arose in the mid-1970s… and the terminology has just expanded and fractured from there.”
Jess Fairlie, Stanford junior and owner of Gopher Snake Garb, sees this fracture manifest in a seeming binary of craft versus art.
“It definitely does bother me when people try to, like, put down crafting for it being crafting, and I think that has sexist roots, because it’s typically something that women would do,” Jess said, “and so, of course, it wasn’t seen as true art.”
However, despite the devaluation of handicraft having tangible consequences for small businesses like Fairlie’s, she said she’ll always crochet regardless of profit potential.
Like Ziegler, Fairlie said her current sales are landing her at below minimum wage.
“That’s okay, because I’m not really in crocheting to make money. I’m in crocheting to design and create,” Fairlie said. “And if someone is super excited about one of the pieces that I’ve made, I’m so happy to cut them a deal, because nothing makes me happier than seeing somebody wear something that I’ve made.”
Over the course of her crochet journey, Fairlie said, she’s become conscious of how much better she feels in clothes that are hand-tailored to her, and she hopes her customers get to experience that as well.
For Amoy, this feeling is intimately linked with their gender-nonconforming identity — which they were working to understand at the same time as they were re-learning to crochet during the pandemic.
“It was very affirming for me to be able to have a vision in my head for the way I want something to look on me and then make it,” Amoy said. “Just to be able to present myself in a way that’s, down to the stitch, me.”
Amoy said they are encouraged by other gender-nonconforming people pushing the boundaries of crochet design. They see this sense of experimentation as indicative of the trajectory of fashion, which they described as a “‘Who cares about gender? Just wear cool shit’ type of vibe.”
Stanford’s Textile Makerspace, which lives on the second floor of Pigott Hall, aims to facilitate this kind of experimentation among students.
The Makerspace was born in the early days of the pandemic, when Quinn Dombrowski, who works in the digital humanities at Stanford, lugged some crafting supplies from home into what was formerly a computer lab. Since then, donations from campus community members and grant funds have grown the space into a studio for students interested in design and fabric arts. Materials and machine-access are provided at no cost to attendees.
Stanford Librarian Mary-Ellen Petrich, who teaches an introductory crochet class in the space on Tuesdays, said she has always enjoyed the diversity within fabric arts, but is especially excited to see so many young people interested in crochet — which she had begun to conceive of as a disappearing art.
“It can look very kind of kitschy and homemade, and has this sort of one-of-a-kind quality that knitting seems to get away from,” Petrich said. “It’s like a chicken or manatee… they’re still cool creatures, but they’re not like dolphins.”
This one-of-a-kind charm is central to both Amoy’s and Fairlie’s ethos. Scarcely do either of them make the same piece twice.
“Crochet is such a unique thing that you can do so many things with, and I think that it would just be a waste of time to crochet the same thing over and over again, when I have so many ideas of things I want to make,” Fairlie said.
Fairlie’s design model, which honors her creative whims and the value of her labor, is in stark contrast to fast fashion — a system that promotes hyperconsumerism to maximize profits.
At its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, mass-manufacturing offered ready-to-wear apparel to people of diverse sizes; it was accessible, efficient, and catered to the clothing needs of those outside the fashion elite.
However, as Alice Payne writes in Designing Fashion’s Future, people’s desire for fashionable clothing has “far eclipsed need,” and now the fashion industry depends on consumers’ conviction that they always need more clothes.
At the same time that younger generations are reexamining the value of hand-crafted clothing, they are also challenging systems that have profited off of erasing that value.
“I feel like there’s a big interest in the circular economy in our generation, and I think there’s a lot more demand and pressure on brands in general, to be creating products that are responsible and that are circular and can have multiple life cycles,” said Stanford FashionX Co-President Olivia Wang.
Ultimately, the onus is still on fast fashion corporations to “bake sustainability into” their business models, Wang said, and small businesses like Ollie Crochet, Ruffle N’ Stitch, and Gopher Snake Garb aren’t going to persuade everyone to prioritize sustainability.
Still, they have the potential to shift the modern culture around clothing, and to inspire people to be more mindful of their own purchasing habits.
“We just have to convince people that you can wear the same thing for a year, more than a year, and you don’t have to be influenced by everyday trends,” Fairlie said. “And also that wearing clothes that are high quality, and are going to last and fit you well, is a great feeling.”
The world may be returning to a pre-pandemic pace, Leventon said, but our desire for meaningful interpersonal connection — which was left unsatisfied during these strange pandemic years — remains, including in our consumer behavior.
Thus, although she prefers analyzing the past to predicting the future, Leventon suspects this third craft revival won’t be the last.
“The more screen-based we get, the more digital we get, the more people are going to be hungry for stuff that someone actually made for you,” she said. “The desire to make something in real life, to handle something in real life, is really strong, and I don’t think we are ever going to lose that.”
