Press

The repairing revival: why more of us are trying to fix – not replace – our clothes

The cost of living and a desire to reduce waste has led to a resurgence in people patching up their possessions

The Daily Telegraph, by Rosa Silverman, January 2023

When times are tough, habits change, and our habit of replacing instead of repairing may be one of them 

CREDIT: Christopher Pledger

They lie out of sight in my chest of drawers, like a shameful secret. Clothes that could still be serving their true purpose in life, were it not for some small defect: usually a hole, sometimes several. 

I’m not a thrower-outer, no Marie Kondo disciple; I like to imagine these garments might somehow recover of their own accord. In the meantime, I wait, keeping the guilt at bay.

I console myself that at least I’m not contributing to the 300,000 tonnes of used clothes that, according to Greenpeace, are burned or buried in landfill each year, thanks in large part to our modern penchant for disposable fashion. We have grown accustomed to buying cheap, wearing briefly, then thoughtlessly casting aside. The rise of online shopping, and the dangerous ease of quick purchases, has exacerbated the problem.

It’s a habit that is environmentally ruinous and financially insane, costing us in the region of £12.5 billion annually. Amid a cost of living crisis, not to mention a climate emergency, it makes no sense at all. 

And it’s not only clothes. Every year, an estimated two million tonnes of electrical and electronic items are discarded by householders and companies in the UK, says the Health and Safety Executive. These include everything from fridges, cookers, microwaves and dishwashers to computers, battery-powered toys and games consoles. 

In our throwaway culture, when something breaks it is relatively cheap and simple to replace it – often simpler than repairing it. Where once we would have defaulted to taking broken shoes to a cobbler, fixing a plug ourselves or finding a high street repair shop, we’ve become far more inclined to consign a broken item straight to scrap. When its replacement can be delivered by Amazon as soon as the following day, the case for mending what’s broken is harder to make to ourselves. 

'We have grown accustomed to buying cheap, wearing briefly, then thoughtlessly casting aside,' says Silverman.

Or it was. But when times are tough, habits change, and our habit of replacing instead of repairing may be one of them. In 2022, spurred on by the twin imperatives of pecuniary prudence and carbon reduction, it seems we are seeing a revival of the art of repairs.

Instagram has witnessed an explosion of content celebrating just that, with popular hashtags including #makedoandmend, #wastenotwantnot and, simply, #repair. Accounts with names such as Mindful Mending and Not Needing New have amassed tens of thousands of followers. There are images of stylishly patchworked clothes; a row of vintage copper saucepans found in a village council tip and given a new home. Once you tumble down this wormhole, it’s hard to remember why you ever paid full price for something new. 

A return to popularity

Amazon, although very much a facilitator of our throwaway culture, also sells the solution: among the best-selling titles in its “self-sufficiency and green living” section are books with names like Darning: Repair Make Mend (Hikaru Noguchi) and How to Repair Everything: A Green Guide to Fixing Stuff (Nick Harper).

Television shows such as The Repair Shop and The Great British Sewing Bee (both BBC One) have helped popularise the arts of fixing and stitching again, while our new monarch, King Charles, has long been a champion of making do and mending, often wearing conspicuously repaired jackets. 

Finally, the rest of us are catching on – or, rather, returning to a custom that was once the norm, but which cheap goods and consumer capitalism had all but killed off.

Sorting through the many clothes I have placed in sartorial purgatory I decide it’s time to take action. I search online for local sewing lessons, and discover they exist a 10-minute walk from my house in north London, at a community enterprise called Stitch! in Palmers Green. I’ve passed many times and never entered; but once I’m inside this small but enchanting emporium of wools, fabrics, cotton reels, patterns and ribbons, I wonder what took me so long. 

Fast-growing demand

At Stitch! which opened in 2019, they offer regular classes in sewing, embroidery, knitting, crochet and more. The demand is fast-growing and, say the women who run it, was fuelled by the pandemic and the extra time people had on their hands.
Pat Stevens, the resident seamstress, has agreed to give me a rudimentary sewing lesson, so that I might breathe new life into my languishing tops and jumpers. I come armed with several, to see what can be done, and am gratified to learn how quickly they can be fixed.

Stevens, who was taught to sew as a young girl by her seamstress mother, sits me down in front of a Janome sewing machine. I present her with two cotton tops from All Saints, which I really would wear again if they weren’t torn. Designed to look edgily distressed, now they just look damaged. “It’s just the seams that have come undone,” Stevens says, like a doctor assuring a patient their ailment is entirely treatable. “It’ll just need one row of stitching.”

She shows me how to pin the two sides of a hole together, then gently guide the fabric through the machine. I’m pleased to find I’ve retained some muscle memory of doing this, although it must be 25 years or more since I experimented on my mother’s second-hand Singer as a child.

It takes us all of 10 minutes to restore the tops to a wearable state. I’m thrilled to have gained two almost-new items of clothing. But I don’t (yet) own a sewing machine, so I ask Stevens to show me how to make a repair by hand, proffering a black woollen jumper from Marks & Spencer, which would be a wardrobe staple had it not acquired an awkward underarm hole. She shows me how to stitch it back together using a thick blunt needle with which even I can’t injure myself. Again, I’m overjoyed and feel as if I’ve been gifted another new item.

Many of us are returning to a custom that was once the norm, but which cheap goods and consumer capitalism had all but killed off. It’s little surprise that others have caught the mending bug, too. John Lewis reports a significant increase in haberdashery sales compared with last year, with Sue Kennedy, category lead for haberdashery, observing that buying habits suggest “our customers are certainly taking a ‘make do and mend’ approach at the moment”. 

Tape measure sales at the department store chain are up by 16 per cent compared with last year, while products in its repair category, such as iron-on fabrics, are up by 45 per cent, and overall dressmaking accessories up by 57 per cent compared with last year. 

Saving money

At the Zip Yard, a clothing repairs and alterations network, demand has been increasing since the summer and the franchise is set to expand beyond its 16 UK branches. As well as repairing or repurposing clothes, staff advise customers on what they can do with items that have seen better days.

“A lot of people don’t know what they can repair and what can be done,” says Neluka Dunning, owner of the Zip Yard UK franchises. “The fact we can extend the lives of clothes for people saves them a lot of money.”

Repairing a small hole in a pair of much-loved jeans, for instance, can be as cheap as £8.50, while more extensive tears can be fixed for under £30. “If you’ve got a pair of Levi’s you’ve spent £150 on, it’s worth the repair,” says Dunning. But even cheap items from Primark are sometimes brought in for repairs. 

“If somebody loves something, they’re willing to pay to have it fixed. We find the 40-plus [age group] is very much into quality, so we tend to have a lot of cashmere jumpers in, which we do hole repairs on. For the [younger] generation, [fashion] is fast and cheap, but we’re seeing more and more younger people coming in. They’re becoming more accountable for what they’ve got and want things to be repaired.”

This desire extends beyond fashion to household goods. Your high street cobbler or repair shop may have long ago shut its doors and been replaced by a trendy café – or a less trendy vaping shop – but a new culture of local repairs is emerging. Across Britain, almost 240 Repair Cafés have opened in recent years. 

Cost of living crisis

At these meeting places, which tend to run around once a month, visitors can access tools and materials to help them repair almost any broken item, be it furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery or toys. Volunteer specialists are on hand to either teach them how to fix it, or do the job themselves for free. An initiative started in the Netherlands in 2007, Repair Cafés have spread all over the world.

“Eighty per cent of the stuff that’s brought in can be fixed by us,” says Sophie Heathscott, who launched a Repair Café in a community centre in Nunhead, south-east London, a year ago. “We get toasters, kettles, lamps, computers, soft toys... We’ve fixed a rocking horse where the rocker mechanism was broken. Really, it’s anything.”

Visitors come from a range of ages and backgrounds. “[We’re seeing] a big shift from being a consumer to an owner, where people want to look after things,” says Heathscott. “There are financial considerations, and being sustainable is cool. There’s a mind shift in people looking after the things they own and not contributing to a throwaway society.” 

The cost of living crisis is clearly playing its part. “Someone came in and said they were here because we were recommended on a money-saving website.”

Another Repair Café is due to open soon in nearby Brixton, and a remake and repair-themed festival is planned for the south London area next summer. Between June and September last year, Somerset House in London hosted a repair-themed exhibition called Eternally Yours. “It’s becoming quite a movement,” says Eoin Heffernan, who is among those behind the Brixton Repair Café launch. 

'There’s clearly a growing recognition that we can’t keep on as we are, throwing everything out and accruing more stuff,' says Silverman. Anecdotal evidence suggests many more of us would like to fix household goods rather than replace them, but find the quality of the item is too low for it to be salvaged. “Everything is so poorly made these days”, is a common complaint among my group of older millennial friends. 

But this, too, may be changing: in 2021, the Government introduced new Right to Repair regulations for electrical items sold in Britain, aimed partly at extending the life of products and reducing electrical waste. Under the rules, manufacturers are now legally obliged to make available spare parts.

There’s clearly a growing recognition that we can’t keep on as we are, throwing everything out and accruing more stuff. Heffernan believes there’s also a burgeoning appetite for learning the skills we need to fix things at home. “We don’t have these skills any more, we’re so disposable-minded,” he says. “We have a convenience culture, a Deliveroo culture. Your first inclination is to go to your phone [and order something]. It’s infantilising.”

But the internet again plays both villain and hero, creating the problem and helping fix it, since it also serves as a repository of vast wisdom. Type “how to repair” into YouTube and you’ll find videos on everything from a bicycle tyre puncture to an Apple watch. Washing machine given up the ghost? There are endless videos explaining how you can fix it yourself. Given how long it currently takes to get someone out to do a job like this professionally, thanks to the labour shortage, attempting repairs yourself makes all the more sense. 

“I don’t think anything is lost,” says Heathscott, who specialises in textiles and, in her early 30s, contests the idea that these skills died out with her grandparents’ generation. “There’s so much online and it’s so accessible. It’s always there in the culture, there are always menders and makers. There is hope yet.”