Here's the teaser: Rihanna appears in this story
Photo courtesy of Lindsay Degen
Lindsay Degen, the artist who just opened Knit Club at Brook and Transit, is really famous, well at least for this neighborhood.
Google it, if you don’t believe me.
Getty Images, the paid picture service, has two pages of pictures of Degen and. her models. She’s got 36,000 followers on Instagram. Boutiques sell her work in New York, London, Belgium and New Zealand and, when she was under 30, she made Forbes’ 30 under 30.
She runs an online knitting club with 2,500 members, had a 10-year run at New York Fashion Week and has manufacturing relationships in China and Peru.
One of the fashion sites wrote that Rihanna had been seen “strutting down the street wearing her designs.”
So, here’s my question: How could a woman who’s seen so much of the fashion world seem so pleased to own a small knitting shop on Brook Street?
It has a lot to do with RISD, where she’s signed up to teach again this semester. Monday from 1:10 to 6:10. And it has a lot to do with her passion for knitting.
It goes way back. Degen, who grew up in Ohio, learned to knit when she was three, while visiting her grandmother in California. As a child, she says, she was full of nervous energy. It was more than fidgety. “I was a nail biter,” she says.
For years, she knit mostly squares. She started a knitting circle in high school and came to RISD with an interest in apparel and fashion. She graduated in 2010 and moved to New York City, her RISD BFA in hand.
The next year, working out of a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, she hired a publicist to push DEGEN, her knit-wear brand. Instagram took off that year and she rode the wave. She was selling her ready-to-wear designs around the world.
As an artist, she is attracted to what she describes as knitting’s central contradiction. Knitting “has limits, guardrails.” Stitches must be counted. Scaling a pattern is a math problem. “There is control, but there also is creativity and freedom,” she says. That’s “inspiring.”
I think you can see that in her knit wear. Everything lines up and fits together, precisely. “My jam is super, high quality,” she says. But, “artisan-made, so you can see the artist’s hand.”
She was still in her early 20s when she made it to New York Fashion Week, collaborating over the next 10 years with Victoria’s Secret, Converse and Hasbro’s My Little Pony.
Then, the pandemic hit. Fashion Week went digital. Even knitting circles seemed too dangerous. Instead of retreating, Degen saw a market and created knit.club to help isolated knitters “share the joy of knitting.”
The pandemic ended and Degen emerged with a full-time job at Converse as “design director for collaboration.” Her job was to help artists and musicians create their own knit wear.
She moved back to Providence, found a studio in Olneyville and commuted to Boston on the train. A steady paycheck with benefits. Fine. But Degen decided she wanted a shop with regular customers who walk in the door, ask questions and knit together.
Like her neighbor Joe Segal, who owns the Pretty Snake, she turned to the Rhode Island Small Business Development Center at URI. Yashwant Meghare became her mentor.
Free of charge, Meghare coached her on the basics: Revenue, expenses, overhead, insurance, payroll… He also helped her get a small-business loan at 2 percent. In late August, she gave Converse her notice.
Meghare says Degen, is very good at “jumping in at the right time.” So, after all that virtual living, does the very next thing look and feel like a knitting circle? Maybe.
Her Tuesday night knitting group has been full and growing each week. From the sidewalk, it looks like a party except everyone’s got knitting needles in their hands.
By fall, Degen says she is going to hire a third employee, add a second knitting night, and open her little shop, Tuesday through Sunday.
“I’m thrilled,” she says.
