My personal practice has largely shifted from making to mending, seeing repair and maintenance as quiet forms of activism in a world dominated by fast fashion.
Here a selection of visibly mended clothes. If you would like to commission a repair or a mending workshop, please contact me here.
“Things only come into visible focus as things when they become inoperable - they break or stutter and they then become the object of attention.”
— Graham, S. and Thrift, N. (2007) Out of Order: Unterstanding Repair and Maintenance
“How can we find the intrinsic motivation to mend when, with such overabundance, no one is short of things to wear? Can we make our necessity a political or ecological one, in the absence of economic or material need?”
— Middleton, J. (2015) Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion
“The most sustainable garment is the one already in your wardrobe”
— Orsola de Castro, Fashion Revolution
“Caring and maintaining for something for someone can be seen as an act of caring for the person themself”
— Juliet Davis, Festival of Maintenance 2019
“I suggest that mending within fashion is a particularly complex and compelling form of commodity activism that is layered with tension and irony. New practices of mending go beyond ethical consumerism and boycotts, by offering an alternative to consumption itself.”
— Middleton, J. (2015) Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion
“The notion of care can radically transform our engagement with fashion. Care is an earth logic paradigmatic shift away from the binary construct of production versus consumption staged by market thinking. Care is intrinsically relational, implying unfolding practices that nurture, grow, maintain, heal as opposed to the abrupt constructs of ‘selling, buying, binning’.”
— Fletcher, K. and Tham, M. (2019) Earth Logic: Fashion Action Research Plan