Craft/Luxury/Privilege

Making clothing by hand is indulgent: it’s all about taking time for yourself, learning new skills, and wearing the results proudly. By allowing ourselves this luxury, we knit more vividly and live more fully, embracing and discovering who we are in each stitch along the way–Hannah Thiessen, Slow Knitting

The conversation about craft as “indulgence” makes me really uncomfortable. Can I say that?

When I dusted the blog back off, it was to write about, among other things, how happy I was to see a new nexus of topics taking off, including quality of materials, fair trade, sustainability, and the deeper values of hand-made. I am absolutely on-board with these things.

When I wrote about mending, I mentioned that it has fallen out of favor because it is no longer economically efficient. I concluded there that the conversation about economic efficiency is (to most people who would be reading this blog) the wrong conversation to have. I don’t care that mending takes more of my hours than it would take of my working hours to re-buy the garment, because I am making a choice about how I interact with retail fashion.

The conversation that we having much less often, though, is how this is privilege.

Let’s be clear: Slow fashion is privilege. Mending is privilege. Knitting is privilege. And that is before you add the actual dollar cost of buying our beloved premium materials.

Leisure time is the ultimate privilege.

It’s easy to dismiss the ever-popular “I’d love to [insert hobby] but I just don’t have the time” as an excuse, and, to be fair, it often is. The average American 35-50 watches over 33 hours of TV in a week.

Many people who are consuming fast fashion have the means to do otherwise. Many people who throw away a shirt when it loses a button have the means to do otherwise. But the reality of 21st century economics is that many other people do not. Americans work more hours, for lower real wages, for more of our lives, than we did in the 1960s. More women are single parents. Communities are more dispersed, leaving each family to do a higher percentage of parenting without support. Fewer neighborhoods have a place to even buy a button and thread, let alone knitting needles and yarn.

We often write, myself included, as though we are persuading that group of people who could opt out of fast-fashion. Unless we are very careful, though, what we do is most likely to be deeply inconsiderate of people who can’t opt out, and overly precious and congratulatory about our own efforts.

I have the material resources to buy $90 of yarn and a $75 knitting bag, both of which I did this week. I have the resource of time in which to spend four+ hours mending a pair of pants. I can support a marketplace that I think is better, more useful, and more beautiful. I am absolutely in love with those ideas, and I enjoy celebrating them. But that doesn’t make me a better or more engaged person than someone who doesn’t have those means.

I don’t know what the balance is, or needs to be, between these two threads. It can be really awkward to admit privilege out loud, especially since we all occupy different points along that spectrum, but I also know that this community is capable of nuance and complexity.