The Year of the Knitfluencer
In late September, at Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s Madison Square Garden Sweat tour stop, Ella Emhoff, the stepdaughter of Vice President Kamala Harris, showed up in a custom knit green beanie with the word “brat” written in big letters across her forehead. When I asked her where she had gotten the beanie, intent on securing one of my own, she pointed to her friend Bailey Goldberg, who was wearing a matching hat.
“People are just so stoked on knitting,” says Goldberg a few months later when I ask him about the hat. “Someone sees one person that they qualify as cool doing it,” he says, “and then that person makes two more people do it, and so on and so forth.”
While Emhoff is maybe the most famous modern knitfluencer, there’s been a steady influx of others taking up knitting needles as a hobby and then commodifying their love of the craft into a full-time job. This year alone, Emhoff launched a Substack called Soft Crafts; British diver Tom Daley announced his knitwear brand, Made With Love; and Goldberg has expanded his custom-made beanie business.
Before the election, Emhoff had created a knitting club, Soft Hands, in bars scattered around the Lower East Side. As the club became popular, she partnered with her friends and their projects, like Jazmine Rogers’s Sustainable Baddie. Goldberg says he’s not as good a teacher as Emhoff but has spent plenty of time alongside her at the knit nights. Since he moved to New York, he’s worked in textiles and credits the start of his love of knitting with a personal attempt to make a sweater he wanted in his early 20s but couldn’t find for sale anywhere. Now he’s selling beanies online and at Selfridges. And while Emhoff had to pause the knitting club because of the election, she’s continuing to knit artwork for resident cool-girl brands around the city like Ganni, Sandy Liang, and Puppets and Puppets.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Daley sat poolside with his knitting needles in hand, busy at work when he wasn’t competing. Often, he popped up on television screens, becoming one of the Games’ many viral moments. It’s a hobby he, too, picked up during lockdown and a tradition he began at the Tokyo Games, where he knit a sweater to commemorate the occasion. This time, his custom sweater featured the Eiffel Tower, his last name, and the British and French flags. His knitting Instagram account has over a million followers, and in the months since he announced his retirement from diving, he’s staged his first knitwear show.
While most trends don’t last, knitting has steadily increased in popularity since 2020. During the pandemic, young people were eager for a way to pass the time, and many people took up new hobbies. Not only was it something to do with your hands, but it was also a way for people to create something from scratch when everything felt pretty helpless and bleak. What started as a solitary act has turned into a community builder, especially among the rise of knit clubs at bars, coffee shops, and apartments, which are remodeling society’s vision of a knitting group.
Around this time last year, Daryl Nuhn spotted a flier someone had tacked inside Prima, the Brooklyn cafe she owns, that said, “Learn how to knit, drink wine, and sit by a fireplace.” It was so enticing that she called up the lady from the poster and, along with two friends, ventured to the advertiser’s house to do just that.
Following the lessons, she noticed an endless stream of people sitting inside Prima knitting alone. “We decided to make it a night,” she said. “The first one was out of control; people were sitting on the floor.” Since then, she’s done four more knit nights and has already planned out more for next year.
“There’s been date nights and couples learning how to do it together, people coming alone and leaving with friends,” says Nuhn. “And then people will come back and be like, ‘I made this hat here. I made this scarf here.’”
Like with any unknown hobby, the beginning is the most daunting part. That’s partially why the rise of knit clubs in bars has drawn in a younger and more diverse audience. And thankfully, now’s the season for it. “There’s something about the coziness of knitting,” says Duhn, who details her and her friends’ preferred winter outing: going to the Long Island Bar to drink martinis and knit.