The Center for Experimental Sweaters by Josh Faught produces small editions of wearable objects. These limited edition sweaters, exclusive to Kneealnd Co., feature the lavender flower. Lavender and its association with queer people can be traced as far back as 1926, when Abraham Lincoln biographer Carl Sandberg used the phrase, “a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets” to describe the former US president’s male friendships. Later, in 1953, the USA went through a period of history known as the Lavender Scare, where homosexual people throughout American society were ousted from government jobs due to their perceived communist sympathies. In 1969, Betty Friedan sought to exclude lesbians from the women’s liberation movement by referring to queer women as part of the “lavender menace.” However, as early as the 1950s, queer groups have reclaimed the use of lavender as a slur through the formation of resistance groups such as The Lavender Panthers and The Lavender Brotherhood. The Lavender Sweater Vest has been designed as a “coffin sweater,” a term used to describe a construction strategy in “fast fashion” where a garment is designed only on one side for efficiency. Established in 2024, all of Josh Faught's works are produced on a Brother KH-940 Knitting Machine. Similar to other standard gauge domestic knitting machines, the KH-940 works by passing a threaded carriage over a bed of latch hooks to produce the desired fabric. In earlier iterations of the knitting machine, pattern was produced through the use of hand punched cards. A binary system, these cards allowed two yarns to knit simultaneously: producing the characteristic knit/float structure, known as Fairisle. The KH-940, released in 1988, was the third electronic machine produced by Brother. By incorporating low-tech circuitry, the machine allowed users to store up to 555 designs into its memory or connect the knitting machine to a computer as a way to circumvent the hand punched cards. The KH-940 and the knitting machines of the 1980s and 1990s produced a generation of vivid, graphic, knit sweaters: anthemic apparel that fashioned two decades of political, personal, and corporeal upheaval for queer people. By 1997, Brother discontinued producing its knitting machines for the domestic market, coincidentally the same year that Protease inhibitors and combination therapies radically altered the trajectory of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The Center for Experimental Sweaters exists within these potent obscure technologies. These objects, and the machines that produce them challenge the politics of taste: celebrating the gaudy, the misshapen, and the unfashionable. They also bear witness to a generation caught between illness and survival, speaking through now illegible codes of community signification.
Materials: Hand knit on a single bed Brother KH-940 Knitting Machine, using Jaggerspun Maine Line wool yarns All sweaters arrive folded in a hand dyed draw string bag and a hand numbered, signed, limited edition Riso printed certificate of authenticity.
O/S: 41” chest
17” shoulder to shoulder
8” neck
26.75” total length
hem to armhole: 13.5”
2.5” bottom hem
1” neck and arm band
