As artist Bridget Harvey says about her jumper:
MEND MORE Jumper – purple, acrylic, large, and textual – is part encouragement and part disparagement. Its stance is political: overt, visible, legible, unmistakeable.
Clothing repair has a strong relationship with women’s history and domestic labour. As part of the reskilling movement, we are choosing to relearn these skills and encouraging others to relearn them and use them too.
In order to become part of what Emily Matchar calls the new domesticity – reacting against the reduction of domesticity into convenience, and ‘longing for a more authentic, meaningful life in an environmentally and economically uncertain world.’ – mending more and binning less has to be led mostly by choice, not by oppression.