The Practice of Mending Caring-through-use: A Strategy for Clothing Longevity

This research focuses on mending as an alternative route towards longevity within a sustainability agenda. Mending can be seen as a resourceful method used to maintain clothes in working order by repairing damaged areas of a garment in order to keep it in use. Such an item may mean delaying the acquisition of replacement garments and lead to a reduction in resource consumption (Fletcher, 2008; Laitala, 2010; WRAP 2012; Laitala, 2015; Fletcher, 2016). Recognition that increasing the longevity of clothing could have the largest environmental impact in a garment’s life cycle (WRAP, 2012), has stimulated a recent surge in mending research by academics within fashion and the social sciences (Gwilt, 2014; Middleton, 2014; Harvey, 2015; McLaren et al, 2016; Durrani, 2018c; Laitala, 2018).

This research proposes that the practice of extending and intensifying the use phase of a garment through mending could increase the resourcefulness of fashion expression. The act of mending can instigate the learning of new skills, building competencies which could potentially assist users to engage with garments differently. To support this theory, a preliminary longitudinal study of four non-mending, self-selected women from the London Borough of Islington occurred which generated multi-layered findings about the practices and ideas of mending. Data was collected by facilitating ‘Wear > Craft > Mend’ workshops where mending interventions were taught and practiced to repair participants’ existing garments. Wardrobe interviews were conducted before and after the workshops had taken place. Wrap-up interviews occurred five years later, to determine if mending was still practiced.

To complement and further triangulate the findings of the preliminary study a larger UK based, predominantly quantitative survey, was completed, which developed themes found within the initial research. The aim was to gain a better understanding of the public’s attitudes to extending the life of clothes, what mending means to them and their motivations and barriers to performing mending.

The research identified different levels of mending: basic, which blurs with wardrobe maintenance and care routines; general and specific, which are more complex these involve an intricate web of behaviours and emotional drivers which were identified in the findings. The conclusions are summarised in a simplified circle of mending diagram, a map of the contemporary mending process that build on academic findings and a list of recommendations. The study provides new insights about categorising strata of mending activity strata to aid research and a behavioural map of mending