The Story Behind Needlepoint’s Modern-Day Renaissance
There are plenty of ways to spend a brisk Saturday evening in the West Village. But on this particular night, instead of grabbing dinner or a drink, I’m en route to a different function: a needlepoint event, where West Village Knit & Needle is expecting a full house. Nevertheless, owner Kiana Malekzadeh has graciously let me sit in on the Stitch and Sip, where, over the next two hours, women pack in the LNS (for the uninitiated, that’s shorthand for “Local Needlepoint Store”) to enjoy complimentary pours of prosecco and bites of Two Boots pizza. Everywhere I look, guests are using candy-colored threads to stitch canvases hand-painted with a cannoli, or a bow, or a caviar pan, which they can one day turn into a patch or an ornament—or a pillow, if they’re feeling fancy.
For a needlepoint novice like myself, it’s a shockingly wholesome weekend scene—even more so considering the majority of those in attendance are not yet 30. But for those in the know, it’s no surprise that the fiber art has drawn such a crowd. A welcome reprieve from scrolling, the high-society craft is the latest centuries-old hobby making a major resurgence among those willing to spend hours hand-stitching and hundreds of dollars on the classes, canvases, and threads required to create their very own future heirlooms.
Needlepoint has been having a moment over the past few years, Malekzadeh tells me—so much so that the business she projected to do in eight years she’s done in five. Uptown, Annie & Co.’s manager Olivia Lipnick and Rita’s needlepoint owner Alyssa Hertzig use words like “skyrocketed” and “exploded” to describe the recent renaissance. “We cannot stock beginner kits fast enough,” says Hertzig when we speak on a Saturday morning. “We probably have 30 or 40, and they’ll be gone by Monday.”
And while needlepoint may still carry a mature association, in Hertzig’s opinion, that old-school charm is the very thing to thank for its rising popularity. “We live in a time now [where] everything is very ephemeral,” the self-described “late-in-life stitcher” explains. “We don’t write on paper anymore. We don’t send letters. Everything is digital. There are so few physical, tangible memories. But needlepoint is something that is physical, that is tangible, that you can see, that you can look at.”
As far as craft hobbies go, needlepoint might just be one of the first. Centuries before Gen Zers took to TikTok to swap stitch tricks and talk canvases, historians have traced the practice all the way back to ancient Egypt. In the 16th century, it evolved into a beloved pastime of European royals, and over the course of the 20th century, it became a mainstay leisure hobby thanks, in part, to its meditative nature. “It’s very relaxing… I call it the adult version of coloring,” 68-year-old Greenwich Village local Renée Klein tells me, who’s been stitching for the better part of the last 50 years. “The act of putting the needle through the hole is almost like breathing,” says Hertzig. “It goes in and out, and it really forces you to slow down.”
