knitGrandeur: FIT The Future of Fashion 2019 — A Deep Dive Into Knitwear’s Most Exciting Moment

There are exhibitions that inform, and then there are exhibitions that transform. The Fashion Institute of Technology’s annual Future of Fashion showcase has long been one of New York City’s most anticipated graduate fashion events, and the 2019 edition was no exception. But for those of us who follow the slower, more tactile world of knitwear with a particular passion, that spring’s showing offered something genuinely rare: a concentrated, ambitious, and emotionally resonant argument for why knit construction is not merely a technique, but a language.

This is a reflection on that exhibition — what it meant for the knitwear community, what the graduating designers brought to the runway and the display floor, and why, looking back, the FIT Future of Fashion 2019 knitwear presentations remain a meaningful touchstone for anyone who cares about where this craft is going.

What Is FIT’s Future of Fashion?

For the uninitiated, FIT’s Future of Fashion is the school’s annual thesis showcase, held each spring at the Museum at FIT on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. It’s the culminating event for graduating students from programs including Fashion Design, Accessories Design, Menswear, and others. Unlike traditional fashion weeks, Future of Fashion is not about commercial viability or media spectacle in the conventional sense. It’s about ideas. It’s about showing the industry what the next generation of designers is thinking, feeling, and building.

The runway show draws buyers, editors, stylists, and working designers who come not necessarily to place orders but to take the temperature of emerging talent. Many designers who have shown at Future of Fashion have gone on to significant careers, and the program’s reputation for rigor means that what you see on that runway has been through months of development, critique, iteration, and refinement.

Within the broader showcase, the knitwear presentations have always occupied a special place. Knitwear at FIT is not treated as a secondary or decorative discipline. It is taught as a complete design practice with its own vocabulary, machinery, history, and set of conceptual possibilities. The students who specialize in it arrive at graduation having spent years learning to think in loops and structures, in tension and gauge, in the logic of yarn behavior and the geometry of three-dimensional knit construction.

The 2019 cohort brought all of that knowledge to bear with a maturity that surprised even seasoned observers.

The Mood of the Moment

To understand what the 2019 knitwear graduates were responding to, you have to understand the fashion landscape at the time. Sustainability was no longer a fringe conversation — it had moved into the mainstream, driven by consumer pressure, documentary filmmaking, and a growing body of journalism about the garment industry’s environmental impact. Simultaneously, a renewed interest in craft and handwork was pushing back against the relentless efficiency of fast fashion. People were learning to knit again. Independent yarn companies were thriving. The slow fashion movement was finding its vocabulary.

At the same time, technology was accelerating. Whole-garment knitting — the process by which a complete, seamless piece is produced on a single machine without cutting or sewing — was becoming more accessible to small studios and independent designers. Digital design tools were changing how knitters could visualize and prototype structures before ever casting on a stitch. And a new generation of synthetic and performance fibers was expanding what knitwear could do functionally, not just aesthetically.

The FIT knitwear graduates of 2019 were living at this intersection. Their collections reflected it honestly: a genuine tension between reverence for traditional craft and excitement about what technology might make possible. Between the desire to slow down and the awareness that slowing down alone would not solve the industry’s problems. Between the personal and the political, the intimate and the structural.

Craft as Concept

One of the defining qualities of the strongest knitwear collections in the 2019 showcase was the way designers used construction itself as their primary conceptual tool. This is something that separates truly exceptional knitwear design from the merely competent: the understanding that in knit, how something is made is inseparable from what it means.

Several designers used the idea of visible process — showing seams, transitions, and structural logic on the surface of the garment rather than hiding them. This is a gesture that carries real weight in the context of fashion’s broader sustainability conversation. When a garment makes its own construction legible, it invites the wearer and viewer into a different relationship with the object. It says: I was made. You can see how. That transparency is itself a form of honesty.

Others worked with the concept of adaptability — garments designed to be reconfigured, extended, or altered through the addition or removal of knit modules. This modular approach, which has deep roots in the history of knitwear (think of the traditional fisherman’s gansey with its regional panels, or the Scandinavian tradition of adding and removing sleeves from body pieces), was being reimagined through a contemporary lens. The results were pieces that felt both ancient and entirely new.

Material Conversations

The yarn choices in the 2019 collections told their own stories. Several designers worked with reclaimed or repurposed fiber — unraveled vintage sweaters respun and knit into new structures, deadstock yarn sourced from mills that would otherwise have discarded it. This kind of material sourcing is not just ethically motivated; it imposes creative constraints that often produce more interesting work than an open material palette would. The designer must respond to what the yarn wants to do, rather than simply dictating to it.

Others explored the expressive potential of contrasting fiber types within a single piece — a merino ground with silk inlays, a mohair halo disrupted by the clean geometry of a cotton rib. These material conversations created visual and tactile complexity that rewarded close looking. They also demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of fiber behavior: how different materials respond to washing, wearing, and time, and how those differences can be used compositionally.

There was also work exploring technical fibers — yarns developed for performance applications that had previously lived in sportswear or medical contexts. A designer who brings a technical mindset to natural-fiber knitwear, or a traditional sensibility to technical yarns, can produce work that genuinely expands the range of what we think knitwear can be. Several of the 2019 graduates were doing exactly this.

Structure, Silhouette, and the Body

Knitwear has a particular relationship with the human body that woven fabric does not. Because knit structures are inherently elastic and three-dimensional, they can be engineered to move with the body rather than simply draped or cut around it. The best knitwear designers understand this not as a limitation but as an invitation — an opportunity to think about the relationship between garment and wearer in ways that are simply not available to designers working in other techniques.

The 2019 collections showed a broad range of approaches to this relationship. Some designers worked in close-fitting structures that tracked the body’s contours, using decreases and increases to create sculptural shaping without seams. Others pushed in the opposite direction, creating voluminous, architectural pieces that stood away from the body and created their own spatial presence. Still others worked in the interesting middle ground — garments that were fitted in some areas and deliberately loose or draped in others, creating a dynamic conversation between the knit structure and the body beneath.

Silhouette ranged from the cocooning and enveloping to the lean and elongated, from oversized outer layers that felt protective in almost a maternal sense to delicate, layered constructions that seemed to dissolve at their edges. What united the best work was a sense that every decision — every shaping choice, every tension setting, every yarn substitution — had been made in service of a larger vision rather than by default.

Color as Architecture

In knitwear, color is never just decoration. Because color is introduced through the yarn itself — through stranding, intarsia, slip stitch, or other techniques — it is always structural. The color is in the fabric, not on it. This distinction matters enormously to how color reads in finished knitwear, and the 2019 graduates demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of color as an architectural element rather than a surface one.

Some collections worked in rigorously edited palettes — two or three colors used in ways that revealed the underlying logic of the knit structure, making visible the repeating geometry of fair isle or the interlocking forms of intarsia. These were restrained but powerful, the kind of color work that rewards careful looking as the eye begins to understand the system underlying the surface.

Others were more exuberant, using color to create optical effects, to suggest movement or depth, or to play with the viewer’s perception of scale and proportion. Gradient work — sometimes achieved through hand-painting yarn before knitting, sometimes through careful ordering of colorways across a piece — created effects that felt almost painterly, blurring the boundary between fashion design and textile art.

The knitGrandeur Community’s Response

The knitwear design community took notice. Blogs, Instagram accounts, and online forums dedicated to knit design and craft fashion discussed the Future of Fashion presentations with genuine engagement, and the conversation around the 2019 knitwear collections was particularly lively. Within spaces like knitGrandeur — a community and platform dedicated to the intersection of knit design, fashion, and craft culture — the work of the FIT graduates was held up as evidence of something important: that knitwear design at the highest educational level was producing graduates who were thinking as carefully and rigorously as any designer working in any other medium.

This matters because knitwear has sometimes been treated as a lesser discipline within fashion — associated in the popular imagination with grandmotherly domesticity rather than avant-garde ambition. The FIT program and its graduates have consistently challenged this perception, and the 2019 cohort did so with particular force. Their work was not just technically accomplished; it was conceptually serious, materially thoughtful, and aesthetically arresting.

For knitters and knitwear enthusiasts who follow the field closely, there is always a particular pleasure in seeing academic fashion education take the craft as seriously as it deserves. The 2019 showcase delivered that pleasure in abundance.

Sustainability in Practice

It would be impossible to discuss the 2019 knitwear collections without returning to the theme of sustainability, because it was woven through so much of the work — sometimes explicitly, sometimes as a quieter but persistent undercurrent.

What was notable was how practically engaged the designers were with sustainability as a design problem rather than a marketing position. They were not simply using sustainable materials as a label or a talking point; they were engaging with the real constraints and creative possibilities that come with working responsibly. What do you do when the fiber you want is not available in a certified sustainable version? How do you balance the environmental cost of shipping specialty yarns against the quality and longevity advantages they offer? How do you design for durability and repairability in a market that often rewards disposability?

These are not easy questions, and the 2019 graduates were not pretending to have solved them. But the seriousness with which they were engaging with the questions was itself evidence of a generational shift — a cohort of designers for whom sustainability was not an add-on consideration but a foundational design value.

Looking Forward From 2019

In the years since the 2019 Future of Fashion showcase, many of the directions those knitwear graduates were exploring have continued to develop and expand. Whole-garment knitting has become more accessible and more widely adopted. Sustainable fiber sourcing has become a more developed infrastructure rather than a patchwork of individual efforts. The craftivism movement has brought more people into active engagement with knitting as a political and cultural practice, not just a hobby.

The designers who showed at FIT in 2019 were, in a meaningful sense, ahead of these developments. They were articulating, through their garments, ideas that the broader fashion industry would spend the next several years beginning to absorb. That is exactly what a strong graduate fashion program should do — send into the world designers who are not just responding to the current moment but anticipating and shaping the next one.

For anyone who cares about knitwear — whether as a designer, a maker, a collector, or simply a lover of beautifully constructed textile objects — the 2019 FIT Future of Fashion knitwear presentations remain a rich and instructive body of work to return to. They represent a moment when a discipline that has sometimes struggled for recognition within the broader fashion conversation made its case with clarity, ambition, and genuine craft.

Why This Moment Still Matters

Fashion has a short memory. The industry moves quickly, and the work of graduate students — however accomplished — rarely gets the sustained critical attention it deserves. What communities like knitGrandeur provide is a kind of counter-memory: a space where the ideas and achievements of knitwear designers, at every level of the industry, are taken seriously and discussed with the depth they merit.

The FIT Future of Fashion 2019 knitwear collections deserve to be part of that sustained conversation. They deserve to be remembered not as a historical curiosity but as a living example of what happens when young designers bring genuine knowledge, ethical seriousness, creative ambition, and deep craft literacy to their work.

Knitwear is not a footnote in the history of fashion. It is one of fashion’s oldest and most technically sophisticated disciplines, with a global history that spans cultures, continents, and centuries. The graduates who showed at FIT in 2019 understood this. They wore their inheritance lightly and built on it boldly.

That is what the future of fashion looks like when it is doing its best work.