on wearing handknit socks

I have a friend who wears these wonderful warm wool socks and as I was admiring them one day, he told me they were hand knit. I asked if his mother had made them (what other sources of handknit socks are there?) and he said no, he had purchased them.

I immediately did the calculation: even for an expert knitter, those socks would take a minimum of ten hours to knit. At minimum wage, including the price of the yarn (100% wool), you’re looking at an item worth upwards of $70. When you consider knitting is a skill honed over many years, you’d want to value the knitter’s labor at something well above minimum wage. But this would require pricing the socks even higher, at $250 a pair.

If, with successful marketing, and a shift in values on part of consuming public, one managed to sell four pairs of socks a week, at a price of $70, that’s $280 a week.

At $250 a pair, one is doing better, making $1000 a week, but $50,000 a year is not a whopping amount of money and you’re looking at a very small market (people who will pay $250 for a pair of socks).

The skill of the hand crafter, sadly, does not command a survival wage. There is no market for handknit socks at a price much above $30 or $40 a pair.

At Christmas, I became the recipient of a pair of these wonderful socks and their superiority, over anything I’d ever worn previously, was so immediately apparent I decided I would never again wear anything else.

I set about buying a second pair. I found a woman in Maine who knits socks by hand and she made me a beautiful pair, in less than a week. She told me they would be $30 so I sent her $40, knowing that even with the extra $10 I was paying her slave wages.

But my interaction with her was so entirely pleasant and I am loving the socks so much, I have reconsidered the inequity of it all. In fact, I have just ordered another pair.

No, she’s probably not getting rich from her knitting. But knitting is a passion. The knitter’s labor (a labor of love) is not disconnected from the product of her labor. Indeed, she is sourcing her own material (shopping for her yarn, in some cases, spinning and dying it), making a product for an individual, and seeing that product safely into her customer’s hands.

Truthfully, even on my very modest income, I could afford to pay $70 for a pair of socks, if I only bought 2 pairs a year and those socks lasted me 10 or 20 years.

Maybe we could all pay a little bit more for things if we didn’t have to replace them so frequently, or if we were simply content with less. With quality, not quantity.

Why do we need to own so many clothes, so many pairs of socks?

If we weren’t so busy we could knit our own socks, but the time crunch is a whole other issue.

The aesthetic dimension of life is immensely important to me, and I do pay money for beautiful things. But I don’t feel the need to have too many things. Two Armani suits have gotten me through 10 years of events and interviews and they are every bit as beautiful as the day I purchased them.

Think of it this way, when you pay $40 or even $70 for a pair of socks, you support someone in a labor of love, not the faceless machinery of global capitalism.