The Mending Revival
“Use it up, wear it out, make it last, do without.” This saying, often attributed to the British, thrifty New Englanders, or Calvin Coolidge, gained popularity in the US during the Great Depression and was also in vogue throughout World War II, when many commodities were in short supply. It’s also apt in the current era, when minimizing the harmful effects of climate change on our fraying planet is a crucial issue.
Recently, when a group of friends and I were discussing climate change, one shrugged her shoulders and said, “It’s already too late. Might as well forget about it and get on with life as usual.” Her fatalism shocked me. The problems are huge and can seem beyond solution, but our young people and seven generations beyond deserve our best individual efforts to reduce our carbon footprints. “Make do and mend,” another motto from wartime Britain, specifies one small way to do just that: mending.
Mending is something I can do.
Long regarded as a humble, time consuming, or obsolete task, mending is undergoing a revival as part of a quiet, needle and thread revolution. Many practitioners, especially those of Generation Z, regard it as a radical act that directly subverts the dominant throwaway culture and the appalling waste generated by the fashion industry.
At the United Nations Alliance for Sustainable Fashion “Hard Talk” in July, 2021, Tatiana Volovaya, Director-General of the United Nations at Geneva, pointed out that “the fashion industry is responsible for one of the most glaring environmental and social failures of our current economic system.” Fashion is among the largest sectors in the world economy, with $2.5 trillion in annual revenue, and almost everyone worldwide is a direct customer. It is the third most polluting industry on the planet, after construction and food, lagging behind in a striking number of social and environmental indicators. Among the millions of workers in the garment trade, 80% are women, often exploited and at the lowest rung of the economic ladder.
Figures from other reliable sources indicate that over 100 billion garments are produced each year, twice more than fifteen years ago. One in two people throw their unwanted clothes straight into the trash. In the US and Britain, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned every second, almost 20 million tons of textile waste annually.
When I was a young girl, my grandmother taught me to sew on the treadle machine that served her well for decades. An excellent seamstress, she possessed and modeled many practical skills. Her cream satin wedding dress, a family heirloom, is truly a work of art. Grandma sewed my school dresses, Halloween costumes, and even my uniform for the Bluebird group that later morphed into a 4-H group. I often watched her bent over her machine, cutting down large garments and refashioning them into smaller coats and dresses, or mending garments with clever, hardly noticeable patches, or reinforcing the knees of work pants. She made quilts too, mostly pieced together of remnants from sewing projects. Mending and patching were parts of everyday life that I took for granted.
Three savvy neighbor moms led the “Merry Timers” 4-H group, and mentored me and the other grade-school girls in thrifty and practical housekeeping skills. Our cooking, sewing, table setting, and other projects reflected the social norms of the 1950’s, when most moms stayed home and kept their households running smoothly. We Merry Timers learned to sew on electric machines—some could do zigzag stitches, and even make buttonholes! Eventually I got my own Singer Spartan, and by high school I sewed about half my clothes and altered garments easily if needed. The skills I learned from grandma and in 4-H have benefited me throughout my life.
Patches, once shunned as unfashionable indicators of poverty, became “far out” and trendy during the hippie era. Youthful members of the counterculture movement, including me, wore colorful patches on clothing as a badges of honor, political statements rejecting consumerism and conformity, or expressions of creativity and artistic expression.
During my early twenties, when I backpacked around the world for three years, my interest in mending grew. I traveled on a shoestring budget from London to Tokyo, passing through 23 countries all told. From North Africa to Bulgaria to Afghanistan to India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, I interacted closely with people who had very little material wealth. They ate things up, used them up, wore them out, made them last, or did without. They had to. They couldn’t afford to waste anything.
At a Tibetan handicrafts center in Dharamsala, India, a young Tibetan man befriended my companion and me. His jeans, obviously a departure from traditional clothing, were embroidered (by his sisters) with flowers and other designs that covered up torn or worn places. “The older people hate patches,” he told us. To them, patches signaled poverty and hardship; clean clothes in good repair signaled prosperity. I can only imagine how they’d view the current fashion of chemically “worn” jeans with intentional rips and hanging threads.
Months later, on a rainy day in Tokyo, I saw a collapsible umbrella lying in a puddle on the sidewalk. It looked brand new. Crowds of pedestrians hurried by, ignoring it completely. In the less prosperous countries I’d visited, that umbrella would have been snatched up within two minutes, and prized.
Returning to the US, wherever I looked, I saw waste. So much waste, when millions upon millions around the world had so little! I was horrified and angry. My aversion to waste lingers to this day. The stakes are much higher now, and we understand that the health of our planet depends on the everyday choices each of us makes.
I became friends with a woman known as, back then, “a German war bride.” She and her husband, well on in years, had prospered from a lifetime of hard work and thrift. When I admired her beautiful multicolored suit of handwoven wool, she admitted it was a splurge, but added, “It’s going to last me the rest of my life.” Her husband overheard and asked, “Why would you want to wear anything for the rest of your life?” I’m with her. A garment of extraordinary beauty and quality deserves to be treasured and cared for over decades, even a lifetime.
Friends tease me when I take mending projects along on getaways. “Nobody does that any more,” they tell me. My mending basket (yes, I have a mending basket, also a drawer of rags, so handy for many uses) is full of projects that I seldom find time for at home. A short vacation, or even a long car ride, is an excellent opportunity to turn up the hem on a pair of jeans, or pin new satin edging on a good wool blanket, or make progress on repairing the vintage crazy quilt square I envision as a wall hanging.
Within the past few years, I’ve begun to feel less anachronistic, less odd, as the mending revival has taken hold. “Visible mending,” intended to be seen and admired, has been featured in galleries, newspaper articles, and magazines such as Vogue, Martha Steward Living, and Better Homes and Gardens. An internet search turns up a wealth of resources: tutorials on You Tube, examples of colorful, artistic mending on Instagram, and recent books on the subject. More and more fashion brands, including Patagonia, Eileen Fisher, REI, The North Face, Madewell, H & M, Arc’teryx, Filson and Levi’s offer trade-in and/or mending and recycling programs. All these are aspects of a “slow fashion” movement that’s combatting unsustainable, ecologically disastrous “fast fashion.”
“Fast fashion” promotes artificially low-priced garments and rapidly changing trends. It depends on clothing manufactured in low wage countries and results in mind-boggling waste. The following United Nations statistics give a sense of its scale.
2,000 gallons of water are needed to make one pair of jeans
20% of the world’s water, or 24.5 trillion gallons, enough for 5 million people to survive, is used by the fashion industry every year.
The fashion industry produces 8 per cent of global wastewater
Clothing and footwear production is responsible for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined
Common Objective, an English ethical fashion group, and ThredUp, an online thrift and consignment business, provide additional facts:
Over 100 billion garments are produced each year, which is 2X more than 15 years ago
1 in 2 people throw their clothes straight in the trash
16 million tons of textile waste is produced in the US each year, about 70 pounds per person, and the amount is predicted to keep growing
35% of all microplastics released into the world's oceans are from synthetic textiles, primarily polyester, which can’t be recycled; the technology has yet to be invented
Between half a million to a million tons of plastic microfibers are discharged into wastewater each year from the washing of synthetic clothes
Though the situation is dire, all is not gloom and doom Ms. Volovaya pointed out that during the pandemic, people changed their habits, purchasing (and discarding) less clothing. Simultaneously, awareness of the social and environmental costs of fast fashion increased, leading to consumer demand for change to an earth-friendly circularity model.
To quote the Patagonia Worn Wear website, “…the best thing we can do for the planet is cut down on consumption and get more use out of stuff we already own.”
Which brings us back to mending.
Mending extends the life of clothing. It requires only needle and thread or wool, maybe some pins, plus time and inclination. It’s not hard to learn a few basic stitches and get started.
Personally, I find mending relaxing and satisfying—a meditation of sorts, like gardening. Careful attention to each stitch or seam stills my mind, and patching and darning present opportunities for puzzle-solving and creativity. I also enjoy the satisfaction of rescuing something special, adding another chapter to its story, and making it last. With countless others engaged in similar small tasks, I’m making a positive difference for our precious, imperiled planet. Most of my mending jobs are basic and practical, but one of these days I may gather the courage to take up needle and thread and visibly, boldly, and proudly refashion my favorite dress—a Joanie Char original in teal wool jersey, now riddled with moth holes—into a work of mending art.
Books on mending, the slow fashion revolution, and related subjects:
“Visible Mending” by Jenny Wilding Cardon
“Loved Clothes Last” by Orsola De Castro
“Mend,” by Kate Sekules
“Mending Life” by Nina and Sony Montenegro
“Wear, Repair, Repurpose” by Lily Fulop
“Mending Matters” and two “Make Thrift Mend” books by Katrina Rodabaugh
“The Conscious Closet,” by Elizabeth L. Cline
“Loved Clothes Last, by Orsola De Castro