Mending

Mending allows us to have a more nuanced relationship with capitalism.

Our old clothes are a blight upon the earth, to overstate only slightly. Our new clothes are, too.

We can intervene in that cycle of consumption on both sides. We can buy new clothes less often and more thoughtfully. We can also keep our existing clothes in use, instead of in landfills/charity shops/third world countries.

Mending is a tricky conversation, though. First, many “fast fashion” clothes aren’t well-enough made to mend. You can’t always fix garments that become misshapen in the wash. Cheap fabrics disintegrate with their seams and buttons intact. Trendy clothes become desperately out of style.

More fundamentally than that, mending is a skill that we simply don’t have anymore. Fabric used to be valuable, and now it is cheap. Saving it at any cost no longer makes basic economic sense. Imagine yourself being paid the hourly rate for your job, times however long it takes you to mend an item, and you very quickly outpace the cost of the item. Once a skill becomes monetarily illogical, it tends to fall from the cultural repertoire quite quickly. No one learns in American public schools how to sew or darn, even though these were basic curriculum for women, and in some cultures men, well into the 1970s.

Of course, many things that are “illogical” when considered merely as a dollar value have, in fact, tremendous real value of other kinds. There has been an intense re-evaluation of many kinds of handiwork, from knitting to farming, in the last 15 years, and our culture and lives are better for it. Still, for every one of those skills, we have needed to take them up one by one and relearn them.

I hope mending’s turn is upon us.