Mending

I love this word and this activity. I remember my mother darning wool socks on a wooden darning egg during quiet evenings in front of the fire; throwing out socks with holes would have been considered wasteful. Then came many decades of fast fashion, aligning with fast food: poorly constructed, made out of synthetic materials by workers laboring like slaves in countries we didn’t know about. Now the facts of the manufacture and eventual demise of clothes are becoming clear. Think about it. This is an area where all of us who consume can contribute.

Kate Sekules’ inspiring book, MEND!: A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto, published by Penguin Books, opened my eyes to some illuminating facts: “How we tend our textiles is as intimate and important as what we feed ourselves, and the industry that produces them—including all its tentacles (shipping, buildings, packaging, washing, etc.) is even more damaging than food production, and may even prove to have as much planetary impact as fossil fuel. Renovating the way we dress is easier and cheaper than adopting an artisanal diet… And mending! Mending is the missing link, the key to it all, especially VISIBLE mending, because of its sheer usefulness, high style quotient, and the way it casually flips the bird at the white male overlords of industry.”

I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with buying new clothes, and felt sickened the last time I tried (at a store here owned by a friend) by the crowd of feverishly  sorting through jam-backed racks of clothes on sale. I liked some of them but the labor of trying on, paying and bagging and dragging home yet another outfit, with no idea where it was made or even what it was made out of, made me hustle out of the store to go sit quietly in the park.

Too much! And the cost is too high, environmentally and morally. I don’t know the women slaving away in China or Indonesia, but do I have the right to ignore them? Most of us well-off white women who joked about “retail therapy” and bought slave-produced low-cost garments at “targét”—pronunced as though it was French, to give it class—maybe could get away with that a few years ago, but now?

One of the most dismaying facts Sekules quotes is that nearly all donated clothes end up being shipped to China, which recently began to refuse these barge-loads of discards that were disrupting their local producers.

Sekules carefully explains with diagrams the way to do conventional mending of holes and tears, but her most original contribution is in explaining and illustrating Visible Mending: colorful patches cover the holes on a jacket sleeve, attached with eyelet or buttonhole decorative stitching using embroidery silk, a Pocket Patch covers larger holes or stains (if they occur in the right place), stitching in bright cotton thread conveys a message on the back of another jacket: THE OPPOSITE OF HATE IS  MENDING. And much, much more conveyed with a delightful sense of humor.

Well, I had to try it. A favorite pink cashmere sweater, just out of winter storage, had earned its holes over eight years of use. I certainly didn’t want to throw it out; it would be hard to find that particular shade of pink in another sweater. Sekules warns that repairing cashmere is tricky, and my result probably doesn’t live up to her standards but the glow I felt on finishing it was almost as beautiful as the glow I feel on finishing a new short story.

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