One time, my wife was preparing to knit herself a new dress. She got a German knitting magazine called "Verena", and tried to choose something attractive. When I started to look at the illustrations, I suddenly discovered that all the images I pored over were strangely familiar to me! And I was reminded that a few days before, I had been turning over the pages of a huge book dedicated to the history of photography all over the world. One picture among others was one of the first color photos, showing an Alps resort around 1912. There were so many happy, rosy-faced skiers, of both sexes, standing under snowy spruces, dressed in sweaters much like those I found in Verena. Men were decorated with manly crosses, rhomboid shapes, snow-flakes, with reindeers galloping from right shoulder to left. Women shamelessly tried to tempt men with flowers (of species unknown even to inveterate botanists), satin-stitched on their shoulders and breasts.

I was literally amazed! As time has passed through the ages, the design of everything in our everyday world has evolved - from town halls to steam irons, from blast furnaces to lever handles, from trucks to tubes of toothpaste, from toilet tanks to ballpoint pens! Only the design of knitwear has resisted change! For me it turned out to be a real disclosure - that nowhere was there such a conservative sphere of creative activity as the sphere of knitting design. And I could not help fighting against such a standstill, and keep devoutly fighting up to the current moment...