The Bill Cosby Sweater legacy

Last Saturday I went to a dinner party for a friend's birthday. The fact that he was the birthday boy wasn't the only thing that made him the focal point of the evening, his knitted cardigan made him the centre of attention as well! Opinions varied on his - what I would classify as a - Cosby sweater.

It's pretty amazing what an enormous influence Bill Cosby's sweaters have had; I mean, there's a whole type of garment named after it. And they still prove to be a source of inspiration to artists and designers today, even after a 30 odd years. Now I only recently found out that the guy who designed the sweaters is Dutch! His name is Koos van den Akker and he left fashionless Holland for New York in the early sixties. Vice interviewed him recently in his NY studio (watch it here - highly recommended!). Koos hits the nail on the head when he looks at the sweaters and says, with a very cute Dutch accent: 

"This is a very thin line between absolutely awful and something of genius. Somebody can look at this and say 'What the fuck is this? This is the most horrible thing I've ever seen' and you know, somebody else says.. 'it's inspiration'".

  

Inspired by this (pizza??) sweater, pictured above, Andrew Salomone created this jumper on a HACKED electronic knitting machine from the 1980s (God, I wish I was so nerdy as to be able to hack a knitting machine!! Watch the tutorial here on the Craft site). Bill on the sweater is wearing the sweater, so there's a nice Droste-effect!

 

Another Cosby sweater inspired project is The Cosby Sweater Project. Kelly Tucker makes drawings of patterns of all the knits worn on the show. Maybe it was the outrageous 80s, but everybody in the Cosby show seemed to wearing awesome sweaters!

Even musicians have been inspired by the sweater: a quick research shows the garment gets a mention in songs by Ghostface Killah, MF Doom and Yelawolf. In 2008 Oh Snap!! released The Cosby Sweater EP. This remix by Hostage is a proper banger, with a nice Miami Bass-y intro. "... the elbow's leather and there's pink and green and o and blue..." hahaha.

Oh Snap! - Bill Cosby Sweater (Hostage Remix). Download it here.

The world should listen

Not long now! My pal Rutger, who nowadays carries the alias of Bart Constant, will release his long awaited new album Tell Yourself Whatever You Have To on January 13 (well PIAS will :-). Which is still a good four weeks... BUT until then you can stream the album from Dutch website VPRO 3voor12! By clicking here. You should. Everybody should, because it is absolutely brilliant. A masterpiece. Maybe you don't believe me and think I'm biased, but just have a look & listen at this award winning video and be converted.

Bart Constant - "Do Better" (with Dustin O'Halloran) from Kimmo on Vimeo.

January 6 Bart Constant will celebrate his release in gallery Meneer Malasch in Amsterdam. And if you're very lucky you can catch him live at the Noorderslag Festival in Groningen on Saturday January 14.

The Hut

I recently came across a story about Roald Dahl's writing hut: the shack in the back of his garden in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where he wrote all his children's books. The family has started a fundraising campaign to move The Hut from the garden to the Roald Dahl Museum (also in Great Missenden) to prevent it from becoming a total ruin. It will be taken apart brick by brick and rebuild and then decorated it in exactly same way as it was. Great!! But. The costs: half a million pounds. Needless to say this caused somewhat of a stir...

Roald Dahl had The Hut built in the late 1950s. He was a man of discipline and routine: he went there everyday for 30 years. Nobody was allowed in! He sat in an old wing chair, that had belonged to his mother, with a writing table on his lap. It rested on a cardboard tube to tilt is slightly. According to Quentin Blake he had a sleeping bag to keep his legs warm in winter. At 12.30 he had Norwegian prawns and half a lettuce for lunch and had a Kit Kat for dessert. I don't know why, but I was touched by the fact that he liked to have a Kit Kat every single day.

On the table he kept all sorts of stuff, among which his own hip bone and a ball he made of tin foil candy bar wrappers ∨. Genius or what?!

Will we ever be able to 'room raid' The Hut?? I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens to it (well, or if you're a little bit more pro-active and got lots of cash lying around you can find more information about the Save The Hut-campaign here)..