Kate Sekules - Mend!: A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto

Mending has baggage. Patched clothing speaks of shame and poverty and drudgery, even of slavery. But mending is a big word. Its 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. Theyre just clothes, but if enough people adopted more creative ways of sourcing, tending, and mending them, wed fix much thats wrong with the world.

Take visible mending (VM) first. This is more than darning a hole. Its 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. Also, in-your-face embellishment is impossible to achieve without a smileboth while youre applying it and when youre wearing it. A color- ful new layer applied to an old garment can be elegant and arty, or sassy and silly, but its always got insouciance and effortless style. So, yes, mending isnt what it used to be. And stitching statements is only the outer layer of a deeper, more expressive relationship with style.

For me, it all started with vintage, or thats what we call it now. In the dark era of the 1970s, when as a preteen in London I discovered the nirvana of Portobello Market, vintage was just old clothes. Hippies had liked them, and punks were about to adopt them, but the collecting of other (probably dead) peoples castoffs was very much thought a bad idea, including by my mother, who was all tearful and Oh, Kate, do you know where its been, does it have fleas? Nevertheless, I, starting at age twelve, religiously scoured the stalls under the Westway twice a week, collecting armfuls of Edwardian taffeta and Indian prints and 1960s ski pants and old tailcoats. Everything was 20p. Maybe a pound for a Mary Quant or some slightly mangy Victorian lace. Nowadays, of course, old clothes are mainstreamespecially since the trade has been brought to scale in Silicon Valleyand provides a decent living (or side hustle) to untold thousands of clothes flippers. But secondhand always has been a major business. For a couple of centuries, its been taking place in the shadows, a messy, unseemly gray market, unfolding, slightly shamefully, behind fashion. And for way more centuries before that, clothes were bank: liquid investments providing insurance for an uncertain future. The story of secondhand is huge, encompassing, as it does, all clothes that exist. And all clothes, sooner or later, need mending. Our relationship to them needs mending, too. To say these two things are linked is an understatement.

One of the most common terms for resold clothing is pre-owned. This is nonsense. All clothing is owned. A shirt belongs to someone until it changes hands, then it belongs to someone else. I feel, ideally, the changing of hands should happen in a more personal way than is currently usual, because clothes are personal. Thats why I prefer them older, because then they have more stories under their belt, more charisma and substance. I see acquiring a garment not so much as a transaction, but more akin to pet adoptionand I adopt a lot. In 2009, wanting a more efficient way of rehoming part of my herd, I made a Petfinder for clothes called Refashionerthough it was much snobbier than that because only the best clothes were allowed in. At its height, a few thousand members were uploading their underworn couture, complete with obligatory story, stalking each others closets, and sellingor swappingmerrily among themselves. Long story short, I learned I dont like business (its fairly mutual), so Refashioner simply evolved into some epic collections of clothes, people, and stories, and now lives on as remnants in the underbelly of my website visiblemending.com.

It is encouraging that more and more people are noticing how the narratives we collect in our closets affect how we feel aboutand inour clothes. There are a few books about this, an academic strand thats often called wardrobe studies, and exhibitions on the subject. This wardrobe narrative is what visible mending builds on. Once youve taken the time and trouble to fix something, carefully pondering the design and utility of your overlay, youve bonded with it. This speaks to a general craving for the handmade and unusual thats growing in our Western culture. A similar syndrome happened a century and more ago as dissatisfaction with increasing industrialization gave rise to the Arts and Crafts movement and American Craftsman style. Perhaps were experiencing the digital version of this, in which peak industrialization plus ultracommunication enables a nonhuman scale of mass production, and the creators and designers behind the product cant keep up. They get fed up. (Also laid off.) So do the consumers. As new factory-made clothes become more and moreoh, whats the word? Boringincreasing numbers of people are looking to the old stuff, just as fashion designers have done for decades, drawing inspiration from the archives. In todays sped-up mass market theres an industry term for the ubiquitous borrowing from vintage designs. Its called shop and copy because thats what they do: buy interesting pieces and recut them in cheap. Well, I dont want the poly-Lycra abomination churned out by fossil fuel and indentured slaves. I want the original. Sooner or later, the original goes holey. So, calling on my ancestral sewing skillsIm the child of austerity-era make-do-and-mend, of domestic science lessons, of a dressmaking mother, and the grandchild of Viennese milliners (men) and whitework embroiderers (women)I mend.