YOU see them every now and then, in among the casually dressed people on William or Howick Street: impeccably dressed old ladies wearing clothes that have obviously been lovingly maintained for decades. (As I write this it strikes me that I’ve seen fewer of them in recent years as they inevitably pass off the scene.)
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The idea that clothes might last – and be used regularly – for decades is an unusual one, but for the environment’s sake, it is worth bringing back.
“Fast fashion”, where clothes are so cheap that they’re virtually disposable items, is now creating towering piles of used textiles across the globe. The recycling system has broken down, unable to manage the flood.
According to the Circular Fibre Initiative: “Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles is landfilled or burned. An estimated USD 500 billion value is lost every year due to clothing that’s barely worn and rarely recycled. If nothing changes, by 2050 the fashion industry will use up a quarter of the world’s carbon budget.”
There’s a growing movement seeking to counter this wasteful trend. Instead of fast fashion, some are choosing “slow fashion”, which is all about slowing down consumption, buying vintage clothes, remaking or remodelling clothing and building more conscious relationships with the workers in poorer nations who make our clothes.
Part of the slow fashion movement is the trend – yes, still a hipster trend, but starting to take off – for “visible mending”. This is a way of wearing your slow fashion heart on your sleeve.
If your jumper gets a hole in it, darn it using a contrasting colour rather than seeking to hide the mend. If your shirt has a tear, add a colourful patch. There’s a young man in Brighton in the UK who is something of a guru in this regard. If you Google “Tom of Holland visible mending” you’ll see some of his beautiful work.
This week I had the pleasure of receiving some of the sewing and knitting paraphernalia of a friend’s grandmother who passed on last year.
I sat at the table for a slow hour untangling embroidery threads and leafing through copies of Golden Hands, the 1970s bible of dressmaking and home crafts. It made me remember my own childhood when it was cheaper to make clothes than it was to buy them off the rack.
It’s not just nostalgia making some of us return to that impulse: there are good environmental reasons as well.
