The Cosby Sweater

It would seem the Cosby sweater is back, the distinctive crazily colourful sweater that was made so iconic on the eighties-era Cosby Show that I couldn't write about knitting sweaters for even a month without referencing it. Hipsters are wearing them ironically and designers are reinventing them. There are websites the celebrate the Cosby sweater, such as The Cosby Sweater Project, the author of which creates original artwork inspired by the different sweaters in the show; and Huxtable Hotness, which examines the sartorial choices of the show one episode at a time (more than one episode at a time would be simply too overwhelming for us all).

This article from Collector's Weekly tells us the back story of Cliff Huxtable's sweaters. The sweaters came from a variety of sources, and were sometimes ordinary department store sweaters, sometimes loaned by designers, and sometimes custom made, one-of-a-kind pieces. The Cosby Show's costume designer Sarah Lemire says the sweaters were not (contrary to popular belief and image Google results) designed by the Australian company Coogi. “My sweaters were busy to a certain point, but it wasn’t to that extreme,” says Lemire. “I still can’t stand those.”

Lemire sometimes designed the sweaters herself and had them handknit by a Boston architecture student, and explains that the sweaters were chosen because they were appropriate for wearing around home and because they wouldn't shift about as noticeably and make it difficult for the director to match the frequent close-up shots of Cosby to longer shots. Lemire sewed Cliff Huxtable's shirts to the sweaters to make certain they didn't shift between takes.

Some of the sweaters Cosby wore on his show were designed by Koos Van Den Akker, a Dutch-born and Paris-trained New York designer whose work Bill Cosby and his wife discovered for themselves. Van Den Akker created collage sweaters that were wearable art for Bill Cosby, and he's still designing today, as this current design from Vogue Patterns attests.

I don't think I'll be donning any Cosby sweaters myself, either ironically or in all seriousness. One thing I'm realizing more and more as I write this blog is how classic and conservative my tastes are, and I'll be sticking to my beloved Fair Isle, cable, lace, and vintage patterns, with maybe the odd hand-dyed yarn if I feel like walking on the wild side. But one insight I'm taking away from all The Cosby Show costume analysis is that Denise Huxtable's costumes, weird as they looked at the time, have aged far better than the attire sported by the rest of the cast. If you want pictures of you to appear attractive several decades down the road, you have two options: updated classics, or outfits so off-beat that they'll never go out of style because they were never in style to begin with.