More celebrity knitting.

Staying on topic today,Index magazine pitches in too:

Marc Jacobs Interview with Mary Clarke:

MARY: The first time I saw your work was back in the mid-’80s when I was an editor at Seventeen. You were doing sweaters.

MARC: Yeah. I learned to knit from my grandmother. She loved to knit in front of the TV before going shopping for pantyhose at Saks Fifth Avenue, or wherever she was going.

MARY: You’re a city kid.

MARC: I grew up with my grandmother on the Upper West Side. Anyway, she taught me to knit, and I used to design sweaters. Then when it came time to do my senior project at Parsons many years later, I had Perry Ellis as a critic. I designed these three really oversized, very heavy, hand-knit sweaters.

MARY: I just took up knitting again.

MARC: It’s really relaxing. Needlepoint, too. I’m working on Jeff Koons’Puppy right now! [laughs] I went to Bilbao, and the gift shop had thisPuppy needlepoint kit. I had to have it for my couch at home. I do like crafts and things.

MARY: How did you get those student sweaters into production?

MARC: I was working at Charivari at the time.

MARY: Which one?

MARC: I worked at two of them. I started out working at the one on 72nd and Columbus, because I lived down the block at 72nd and Central Park West.

MARY: I used to do a lot of window-shopping there. It was so chic.

MARC: Barbara Weiser, who was one of the buyers, had seen the sweaters at my school show. She decided she wanted to produce a limited edition for the stores. Andy they were photographed all over. It was a time when Gaultier had a very big, tapestry-looking sweater. Bill Cunningham picked it up for “On The Street”, which he still does for the Sunday Times. He did a story that depicted four different people in the sweaters, as seen on the street. That was sort of the beginning of my career.

   

Index magazine appears to currently not have a functional web site. In the April/May 2001 issue you can also find Thurston Moore interviewing 30-YEAR-OLD-DRUMMER Susie Ibarra. This is cool, I did not know who she was.

THURSTON: A lot of hard-core Houston bands used to play in New York in the early ’80’s. I was really into DRI and Pissed Youth.

SUSIE: Oh, is that what you’d call that- hard-core? I’m really bad with the lingo! [laughs]

(Edit- Bless you Susie).

And finally if you only have 5 seconds and always wanted to see what Manhattan cable- access TV star Robin Byrd looks like not wearing a macramé/crochet bikini, turn to page 103. I guess that brings us right back to knitting.

(Edit- as if to drill some strange point home, when/if you move out of Manhattan, you no longer are privy to Manhattan’s Cable Access TV..it is a distant memory for me. Who knew that Brooklyn ran on family values.)