Georgia Hilmer

 Annie Lee Larson

July 16, 2021

Annie Lee Larson makes really cool sweaters. I look at them and I think: How did you do that? Why would you do that? Can I do it too? The sweaters are bright blue and tomato red, striped and studded with symbols, playful and yet decidedly adult. Annie makes them with a knitting machine, something I didn’t know existed until she shared a picture of hers — a little menacing, more computer than crafty — online. In regular dispatches about her studio practice and works-in-progress, Annie made me believe I could do what she does, as long as I harbored an ounce of her knitting obsession and had a few thousand hours to commit to trial and error. Her wicked sense of humor and rigorous aesthetic transformed my understanding of knitting’s potential: the art form can be sleek and modern. When she started adding updates to her knit-heavy feed about her campaign to be a union representative at Parsons, where she teaches, I was intrigued. Annie’s Instagram: come for the sweaters, stay for the labor organizing!

I reached out to Annie in the hopes of understanding more about both her knitting and union worlds (she won her election and became part-time faculty unit chair). How do her aesthetics and ethics align? When are they in conflict? What does it mean to be so many advocates at once: for yourself, for your students, and for your colleagues? The common thread I was surprised to find between Annie’s many pursuits was language: its multiple forms and functions, its pitfalls and potential, its artistic and administrative uses. Learning the language of the knitting machine — an ongoing saga involving math and agony but also satisfaction and beauty — has allowed Annie to express her deeply personal creative vision. Working as a union representative has meant honing another aspect of her voice so that she can speak for others. There’s tension and harmony in the dichotomies she’s living with: as an individual artist and a community organizer; as a self-taught creative and a teacher of others; as a successful small business owner and an underdog battling a large institution. So much of the beauty in Annie’s work is the result of not giving up when the going gets tough. Her determination is inspiring and a little bit astounding. It was refreshing to talk with her about all the different kinds of meaningful work an artist can be engaged in, in the studio and beyond.

This interview took place in April 2021. It has been edited and condensed.

Where did you grow up and how did you get interested in designing clothing?

I grew up in rural Wisconsin. When I was young I was pretty creative; my grandmother taught me to sew and I would make my own clothes. I started working at the grocery store when I was in high school and I cut one of the extra large polo shirts they gave me in half, added an extra strip of fabric between the top and bottom, and made it into a dress. People didn't really know how to deal with my style in my small town. Everything was an experiment and I found a lot of joy in wearing and thinking about clothing. Even now I have such a strong memory of all the clothing I've ever owned; expressing myself that way has always been really important. 

I didn't come from a creative family and I didn't come from a very cultured environment. I definitely grew up sheltered. Everything that I became interested in was me just trying to grab at different things and a lot of it was boredom — there wasn't a lot to do. By the time I was finishing high school I knew that I wanted to do something creative.

After being so obsessed with clothes, what was it like going to school to study fashion design?

It was very technical, which is good because I am a person that is rooted in technique — it’s the foundation of my creative process. It was not a great education overall but I learned a lot of skills about pattern-making and that kind of thing. I didn't end up using any of that knowledge when I entered the workforce. I worked at Target Corporation for about three years as an assistant designer and that was the only “real job” I ever had. I was way too young for that job. For the last eleven years it's been all about knitting, which I didn't study in school. We didn't have textile classes, I never learned how to knit. That was not my background at all.

Working with textiles is not something that everybody has to learn in fashion school?

No, not at the school I went to. It's different teaching at Parsons, it's been so eye-opening. When I was younger I felt a lot of angst about not being able to go to a ‘real’ design school. My family couldn't afford it and it wasn't really encouraged. When I started teaching at Parsons I felt like, “Oh, this is my chance to exist in what I consider to be a ‘real’ design school, a world-renowned institution.” I’m teaching and I'm interacting with students but I'm kind of also having the student experience that I never really got to have. I’m in a critical environment where people are having more robust conversations about design and craft. That just wasn't a part of my background at all. A lot of the students at Parsons are required to take fashion electives. They can take my class, which is machine knitting, but if they don't take my class they can take weaving, hand-knitting, leather-working. There's so many different things that I wish had been a part of my education. When I started knitting it was well after school and I was all self-taught.

Did you bump into a knitting machine? How did that discovery happen?

When I was working at Target I was designing classic men's knit sweaters, which was a lot of argyle, a lot of stripes, a lot of cardigans and polo shirts and stuff like that. I was bored out of my mind. I did not know what I was doing, I wasn't good at my job. I became familiar with knitting through that work but in a very commercial sense, about what they do at the factory. We didn't have to really know about knitting ourselves. During that time one of the other designers told me about knitting machines. I'd never heard of one. I went on Craigslist and I found a woman in the suburbs of Minneapolis who was selling them and I bought one for $400. She showed me how it worked and I was like, “What is this?!” I'd only been working in a corporate environment and everything about the machine was like, “Oh my god, there's so much possibility here.” So I bought it and I did learn how to use it and then after about six or eight months I quit my job. Being in my early 20s, working at this corporate job, living in a $200-a-month shared house, I was making the most money I'd ever made at that point in my life. I was able to save up quite a bit. Once I discovered the machine, it didn't really matter if I had a plan, I was just like, “I know that I can't do this job anymore. I'm going to quit.” Within that year I launched my first made-to-order web store. That was in 2010 or 2011 and I have been doing that ever since.

To my surprise it kind of worked right away, in the sense that I found something that I was really happy doing and have loved doing every day since then. It's a challenge, I've had to piece together my income. My business has never been crazy busy; it's always kind of slow and steady. Eventually I started teaching and now I do this union stuff on the side. 

How did you know you could make a life out of just knitting? What what gave you the guts to go ahead with it?

I didn't know I could do it. I really had no idea. I've never written a business plan. I always tell my students, “Don't ask me for business advice because I don't think that I'm a good business person.” Honestly, I never said, “Tomorrow I’m going to start a knitwear label.” I'd already been sharing my knitting projects on my blog and Flickr. People liked them and that gave me confidence. When I started I thought, “This is something I'll do for a year and then I'm going to get another job,” but then the work kept coming. For the first six years I didn't have any other income or any other jobs. Knitting was my full-time gig. I moved to New York in 2011 and moved the business here. At that point I was really like “There's no way I'm going to be able to make this happen and continue doing this in New York,” but somehow I've been able to hang on to it.

I learned about halfway through that I don't want 100% of my life to be my studio practice. I came to understand that teaching was very important and a necessary part of my practice. It’s also fortunately another way to make money. I really didn't think knitting full-time was gonna work, so it was a surprise.

Was the move to New York guided by a need or desire for community? What propelled you?

There were several things. I grew up in the Midwest and I’d lived there my whole life and never lived anywhere else. First and foremost I just wanted to get out of there. I had a wonderful creative community in place after college and still have really close connections with a lot of people — I felt like we all sort of came of age together. But I wanted to live in a less white place. I really had a strong desire to not be totally surrounded by white people.

Was it great not being around only white people all the time once you got here?

It was so great. I don't know if I'm going to live in New York for the rest of my life but I know that I certainly never want to live in a place that has a totally homogenous population again. I think that New York is truly one of the most diverse places in the world. I love it here. Every time I leave I'm so happy to come back. I really think of New York as my home. So yeah, it was a relief. But it still took me many years of living here to even connect with other Asian Americans. I never had a lot of Asian friends before I moved to New York and so it has been really great in particular to get to know so many wonderful Asian women.

I'm very curious about how closely the style, point of view, color sense, and rigorous design aesthetic you have now hews to the ideas behind the first stuff you made. Does your work now feel connected to your work then?

It's very connected. There's definitely a lineage there and it's very clear and color has always been a part of it. What I've always done is  focus on a specific technique and figure out all the ways that I can manipulate that technique into some kind of visual system that can have different manifestations. I have cycled through several different techniques. I tend to linger on one for a while and try to do all the different things that I can do with that technique before moving on to explore something else.

The thinking is: “How can I push this one application of this one technique to create a visual outcome that is very specific to me?” When I say “specific to me,” that's not about ego or ownership relating to ego. What is so fascinating and interesting about knitting to me is how, with one machine, you're creating a fabric and the design that goes into the fabric simultaneously. The two cannot be divorced from each other. I tell this to my students at Parsons all the time: “To feel success in terms of design is to be able to feel true ownership over the creation of your fabric.” I think that that is why knitting is so interesting to so many people. It's that rigorous and constant experimentation with these techniques, and the real intimate understanding of them in relation to your own personal aesthetic and context, that ultimately makes things that are really interesting and individual. You don't really have to spend time worrying, “Is someone else gonna copy this?”

Machine-knitting sounds like … doing math? Or learning another language? You have to find your voice in that language — you get the grammar and you get the vocabulary — and then it's up to you to spell new words? I guess that metaphor gets a little tortured.

I'm not really gifted at math but I'm lucky that knitting math is not very complicated. It's really basic but it's not a pretty process. I think people have this perception about designers that we're just sitting behind a blank sheet of paper and we're like, “Oh yes, this is what I desire, this is what I want to make.” I've never worked like that. When I design I have a regular notepad where I scribble numbers and write down notes; the other part of it is making swatches. I think of the the swatches as sketches and I cut out the whole process where I'm trying to draw.

How quickly can you tell that something is a disaster when you're sketching that way?

Such a good question. It varies; sometimes right away I put two things together and I think, “That is awful, I definitely don't want to do that.” Other times I will go through months of trying to get it right and and then I’ll realize at the end that I have to abandon the idea. It just depends on how dead-set I am on trying to figure it out.

What happened when you started teaching? Was it terrifying? Was it a total watershed moment?

Teaching was definitely a life-changing experience for me — on par with discovering knitting in the first place. I was super afraid, I was really self-conscious. I was super, super nervous and also just felt sort of inadequate because I didn’t have a great design education. Things got easier when I realized that it's okay if your students know more than you. Ultimately that's what you want. I learned so much from just preparing for class, understanding how I wanted to communicate, how I feel about knitting. Figuring out how to pass that information on to someone else really made me understand what my practice is. What do I believe in? What are my values? Forming a really clear line of thought around that only helped me become a more clear and confident designer. I just love it so much and I love my students and I'm still in contact with so many of them. I feel such tender feelings for them. Seeing people discover the machine and understand how to use it, seeing things click, even seeing them hate it — I love all of that.

I've been teaching since 2016. I didn't teach at all this year because so many classes have been canceled at Parsons and it's a specialized course that you can't really teach remotely. When we first went into lockdown last March, I had this moment where I was like, “I don't know what is happening.” I felt really worried about my business. “Nobody's going to want to buy sweaters and I don't want to ask people to buy sweaters in this horrible time.” I had this existential crisis but I also had a very practical concern, which was: I don't know how I'm going to make money or how I’m going to survive. I started teaching online courses through my own studio and that was amazing. I did it from April up until August last year and I've had online students from all over the world. Conducting the classes over Zoom was incredible. In the midst of the pandemic it was kind of the only thing that was keeping me going; it was something to focus on. It was a way to make ends meet but it was also a way to be able to talk to people from all over. I love talking about knitting with people and seeing their projects and seeing how differently they think about things. It really just does bring me so much joy.

Teaching has made me a more open and generous person. Before I was very cagey, like, “I don't want to tell anybody about my techniques. I don't want to tell anybody about my materials.” I was very private about everything and I think that really came out of feeling self-conscious. I felt inadequate and I was worried about people surpassing me. I felt like I needed to be very protective of my process and then I realized how damaging it is to think that way. Once I started teaching I just changed completely.

I get having imposter syndrome and feeling inadequate about being self-taught but also … it sounds like you worked so hard to build this knowledge for yourself! I totally understand not being down to give it all away based solely on the number of hours you put into learning it all on your own. That generous spirit is awesome but it would not be unreasonable to say, “I have fought and bled for this information,” and be protective about it.

I think there is something to that. But if I'm being really honest, I was very much feeling territorial and maybe possessive about things that I shouldn’t have been possessive about. Through teaching I learned that it doesn't matter if other people have the same information as you, you have to trust that they're going to do with it what they're gonna do with it. Yes, there will be people that copy your work or derive too much inspiration from it or whatever, but I feel like it's not worth it to get bogged down in that. That is not the thing that you want to waste your time thinking about. Just keep going forward and keep making work that you feel great about. Keep putting stuff out there.

Now I have text conversations with former students where they’ll text me questions and I'll answer them pretty much any time. I'll help them with the math, help them figure it out. It makes me happy to see other people do their work. Especially students, I have a very soft spot for students.

How did you get involved with the union?

I've been teaching at The New School at Parsons since 2016. At the beginning of the pandemic there was a lot of frustration among part-time faculty in The New School, who make up about 85% of all the teaching staff. A lot of part-time faculty were feeling disgruntled about the lack of information about what was going on with the school and pandemic planning and classes. There were a lot of unanswered questions. I became involved with a group of faculty advocating for our rights and just got kind of sucked in. I met a bunch of people that were union officers who were forming a slate to run in the union elections last November. They asked me, “Do you want to do this?” We ended up running a slate of candidates for every single elected office position in the union. We ran a candidate for every position on the executive board and we won every single one. We were sort of like an insurgent campaign, so to speak: we replaced a lot of people that had been involved in the union for the last 15 years; it was kind of dramatic in that sense.

I won my election by two votes. It was crazy. I did not expect to win. I sort of knew that I was being asked to come along on this ride so that we would have a full slate of candidates — nobody thought that I would win because my opponent was a 15-year incumbent who had never been challenged before. Nobody had even run against her; she won by acclamation every time because no one ever challenged her. That was a first. To be honest I wasn't really prepared for that outcome. There were a few weeks there where I was kind of in crisis mode. But now I'm super into it. No regrets at all.

Okay, my two questions about that are: What exactly is your position within the union? And what did you know about unions before you got involved?

I'm the unit chair for the part time-faculty unit, which is made up of about 1,800 part-time faculty members. My role as the unit chair is to work with a dedicated team of union representatives  who handle member issues. The main thing we do is uphold and enforce the contract that exists between the union and the university and organize workers to stand up to the boss. The unit chair position is an elected position and the term is for three years. Prior to this I had zero experience — I'd never done any labor organizing. I'd hardly, to be honest, even read our contract. Every single day I'm learning so many things.

What is being in the union teaching you about labor and big institutions and for-profit universities? Only good things, I'm sure.

So much! Like how horrible some institutions and management structures are and how poorly workers are treated. How little acknowledgement there is for the issues that workers face in general. Something that has become very noticeable throughout the pandemic is that not everyone is starting from an equal place. When you have a global disaster like a pandemic that affects everybody, it might seem like it's affecting everybody the same, but there are people that were already disenfranchised and not on equal footing that are being harmed more.

Management will do everything it can to preserve whatever is in the best interest for them. They reserve the right to do that and it can feel really ruthless and ungenerous and frankly just really fucked up. Right now, for example, we have this healthcare issue where the school unilaterally decided to change our healthcare provider. The new plan has a 10% coinsurance, which means that members have to pay more for all different kinds of services. In the middle of a global pandemic, the university essentially reduced the amount and quality of our coverage and are charging members more for it. That's just a messed up thing to do, especially for an institution that prides itself on its commitment to social justice and equity. We also try to get people's jobs back if they've been fired for unjust reasons. If someone loses their job in the middle of a pandemic and they don't have other income, that's going to affect them so much more. There's just a blanket denial of those kinds of circumstances and it's really frustrating.

Are you interfacing directly with these people who are screwing everyone over? What do they act like when they're delivering this information?

Yes. My other main job, as the unit chair, is to be the person that interfaces with the university. So whenever there's a meeting between the university and the union regarding part-time faculty issues, I'm the one speaking on behalf of part-time faculty. It's interesting to me because in a way I feel like we are kind of role-playing. There's something that's very performative about it. The lawyers we go up against are the university’s top legal counsel. They're top lawyers — we're not lawyers, we are educators, artists, designers, musicians, etc! They're really good at their job. They're really good at just handing down these decisions that are really troubling. They are working for what is the best for the university and there's no illusions about that. The union is all about what is best for faculty, what is best for workers. You have to remind yourself that we're all people that have lives, we have interests outside of this work that we do. I think there's a lot of value in understanding that. Our feelings about the people that are our “enemies” are not personal. The animosity isn't personal. It's the structure of the two parties. That's just how it is.

Is that enlightened position something you arrived at on your own or did someone who's more veteran teach you to think about it that way? That's not how I would automatically respond … I would take everything very personally. I probably wouldn’t be a very good unit chair.

Early on some people were definitely like, “You can't get upset when members come at you, you can't get upset when the university tells you you're wrong.” They tell you all the time that you're wrong. The way that I have to write emails for this job, every email that we send to the university has to be perfectly crafted. Every word has to be right on. We have to run it by our lawyer, make sure that we're not saying something we shouldn't say or giving up rights or anything along those lines. Even the emails are like role-playing.

Despite not having any experience in labor organizing or holding elected office or anything, the thing that I find really personally interesting about this job is: The contract is this agreement between the two parties. There's a lot of things related to the contract that are about understanding the limits of language and pushing interpretation to the nth degree. A contract might have various sorts of basic, almost open-ended-seeming legal language. It will feel like, “How is this a functional document that can enforce anything?,” until you understand that there is enough space left open so that each side can say, “My interpretation of the language is x.” And so it's all about the interpretation of language. I don't fancy myself to be an academic and I never thought I was a great writer or anything like that but the work is just really about how much can we get out of the language. It can feel like a game.

There's a nice parallel there between the negotiations you are in with the union and interpreting the language of your knitting machine. If you can master each kind of language and technique you can find some freedom and possibility. The two pursuits sound related in more than one way — in each you’re expanding a new part of your brain, playing, creating change.  

Yeah, I mean it's very strange in some ways — we sort of function as lawyers even though none of us are lawyers. I have to go to disciplinary meetings with faculty where they've maybe done something bad and I have to represent them and advise them on how to not get fired. The first time someone told me what my responsibility was they were like, “Your job is basically to go to this meeting and be their lawyer,” and I was like, “What are you talking about? I'm not a lawyer, I'm a teacher.”

And I won this position by two votes!

Exactly. I was not prepared for the job but, even though I don't have a background in any of this, I find it really interesting to think about language in that way. If it weren't for that I really would probably very much hate this job. It's so rewarding when we're able to win things for faculty — to get someone money that they were owed or get them classes that they should have been assigned or get the university to extend their health benefits or whatever. Even those small wins feel so great. Every day we win something for one member is a good day.