Yarn Bombing Hits the High Street (original) (raw)
Fashion|Yarn Bombing Hits the High Street
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London Kaye at her studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn.Credit...Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times
- Dec. 2, 2016
Not long ago, a street artist named London Kaye became embroiled in an unexpected controversy. A flea market in Bushwick, Brooklyn, partnered with her to create a large-scale installation. So Ms. Kaye crocheted a portrait, measuring 15 feet by 10 feet, of Sam Shakusky from Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” holding hands with the creepy twins from “The Shining.”
“It was about young love,” she said.
Not everyone was charmed. Though Ms. Kaye did not know, the flea market hadn’t secured permission to hang her work on an adjacent building. Anti-gentrification activists took their frustrations against her to social media. Gothamist reported that one aggrieved person equated Ms. Kaye and her work to “colonizers who claim indigenous lands for themselves.”
“I was the perfect scapegoat,” said Ms. Kaye, who is 28. “It was three white kids holding hands — it was huge.” She took the installation down.
There may be a double standard here. Few would call Banksy’s work gentrifying, but Ms. Kaye’s genre of street art, known as “yarn bombing,” has been widely derided as a hipster fad or dismissed as cutesy, mere “women’s work.”
But Ms. Kaye is proving it to be much more. In her hands, crochet is both an outlet of creative feminist expression and a lucrative career. Her boundary-unraveling work is appearing throughout the culture, from high fashion to the heart of the mass market.
There’s no question that the needle arts are having a moment. “It used to be that a lot of people didn’t like crochet or relegated it to your mother’s afghan, but there’s been a big renaissance,” said Trisha Malcolm, editor in chief of Vogue Knitting.
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