One Million Cosby Sweaters Can’t Be Wrong Or Right (PHOTOS)

When “The Cosby Show” premiered on a Thursday night on NBC in 1984, history was made.

For the first time Americans and our admirers, were shown a Black American family with extraordinary gifts of communication, history, music, style, class and no catch phrase.

For some, the show represented the best of what a Black family could be on national and sitcom based TV: Dad was a doctor, mom was a lawyer, their five kids were all different spectrums of Black and they were funny. Mom wasn’t overweight, dark and loud.

Others, however, thought the show was a fantasy, an exercise of one man’s ego and his quest for control of people’s lives, (Google Denise Huxtable and/or Lisa Bonet to discover what we mean) and unrealistic.

For example, why were Clare & Cliff home so often if they had such amazing but demanding jobs? How come Theo didn’t have an awkward same sex moment with Cockroach or any of the guys he hung with? Why didn’t Denise have a pregnancy scare? After all, some of these experiences were reflective of the Black experience Cosby tried to represent, no?

What Cosby did represent strongly however was his and his actors’ sense of style. Each episode was dotted with a clever outfit worn by him or his team players. The item that caught your eye, however, was the Cos’s and kids sweaters, many of which were expensive designer threads that would break the bank of a upwardly mobile Black family in the mid-1980s in midst of the crack epidemic. Years after the show went off the air, Bill Cosby tried to auction some of the sweaters, the starting bid was 5G’s.

Watching the show on Netflix recently, we were struck by the multiplicity of the Cosby kids’ styles, many of them influenced by the upswing of Japanese fashion which ran parallel to the show, sweaters especially.

After the break, thanks to the magic of Tumblr and TheCosbySweaterProject@Gmail.com, the man responsible for these screencaps and illustrations. Enjoy.

Above: Season 2, Episode 9, “Claire’s Sister.” 

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Season 1, Episode 19, “Claire’s Case.” 

Cosby Show Pilot. 

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Season 1, Episode 6, “Breaking With Tradition”

Season 2, Episode 1, “First Day of School”
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Season 1, Episode 18, “Vanessa’s New Class”

Season 1, Episode 5, “A Shirt Story.” This has to be the most famous shirt on TV, A Gordon Gartrell creation. Hands DOWN!

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Season 1, Episode 11: “You’re Not a Mother Night”