The Case For Never Buying New Clothes Again

Mending has baggage. Patched clothing speaks of shame and poverty and drudgery, even of slavery. But mending is a big word. It’s about repairing more than clothes. History, for example, which must be unpicked and remade, healing systemic injustice, making reparations, exposing scars. Clothes historians do this via what we wear, which turns out to be more important than we realized. Visible menders do it literally, by stitching new stories onto the worn fabric of our lives. They’re just clothes, but if enough people adopted more creative ways of sourcing, tending, and mending them, we’d fix much that’s wrong with the world. Take visible mending (VM) first. This is more than darning a hole. It’s a protest movement and an art form and a fashion statement. To stitch or sport a VM is to declare independence from the sickness of consumer culture with a beautiful scar and a badge of honor: “Look, I kept this out of the landfill!” Read more at Fast Company.