On The Mend:
A Visible Mending
Renaissance

Looking at a photo of designer and mender Erin Eggenburg’s collection of darning mushrooms, eggs, and sticks, I thought of the matsutake mushroom—how it thrives in decay, growing in alien clutches. “When Hiroshima was bombed in 1945, it is said, the first living thing to emerge from the blasted landscape was a matsutake mushroom,” writes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. The matsutake is the most valuable mushroom on the planet, and yet it prospers in forests of the northern hemisphere that have been particularly marred by human interference, nourishing itself on our damage.The visible mending that Eggenburg practices and teaches has an almost fungal quality to the way it spots a holey garment; “swiss cheese” sweaters (as she charmingly calls them) and shredded jeans, dotted with bright cross-hatched squares, dashes, and seeded spots. In Eggenburg’s mending can be seen material symbiosis: a hole needs to be mended, and mending needs a hole.

Thinking about mending means sifting through all the metaphor that attaches itself to this pacific human act. Mending repairs what has been ruptured, and in doing so, articulates our relationship, and continued responsibility, to what we proudly possessed when the thing was new and unbroken. It is ours, and we will fix it with our own hands.

Recently, an invigorated-by-the-pandemic mending practice has gathered momentum, adopting bygone traditions and fusing them with the digital platforms of now. It is often referred to as visible mending; finding creative fixes that display rather than hide the work of garment repair. The term was popularized by Dutch mender and textile artisan, Tom van Deijnen aka Tom of Holland in 2010, and spread quickly thanks, in part, to social media. Now, visible menders like Eggenburg, Flora Collingwood-Norris, Kate Sekules, Lily Fulop, and Katrina Rodabaugh spread the mending word through their websites, workshops, huge Instagram followings/hashtags, and popular books.

Clothes have been mended for hundreds of years, and yet, this iteration reflects some of our current global concerns. In the middle ages, mending was a necessity vis-a-vis profound and widespread scarcity of clothing options. Now, we suffer from the opposite as we drown in an excess of cheap and ill-gotten clothing. Every year, fiber from discarded clothes amounts to over 37 million tons of material waste each year, ending up in landfills (often overseas) or incinerators. The spread of visible mending looks to curtail this, not just for our own personal satisfaction, but for the sake of the planet. “And if that’s not enough,” says Eggenberg, “the people who actually make the clothing in factories work in poor or dangerous conditions and earn unlivable wages. All of these factors make it impossible for me to choose not to mend.”

As Kate Sekules writes in her book MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto, during the middle ages, clothes were so precious that a pair of linen underwear was passed down through multiple generations. Linen, a plant, and wool, a sheep, were once living things. With the combination of constant wear and little to no washing, these garments rotted and hung off the bodies of the wearers like skins. Long before industrialization, people sheared their sheep, carded wool, spun thread, and spent months weaving it into cloth. Only then could it finally be cut into a suit and sewn by hand, kept in existence through exhaustive mending—to the point of becoming more patch than original. Textiles were as valuable as gold, Sekules writes, and were passed down, and down, and down. The clothes themselves were alive with organic matter, and thus more prone to conventional rotting than the petrochemical-infused ones we wear now. Peasants and gentry alike performed life-saving surgeries on these decaying garments, which were delicate as groceries. There was no viable alternative.

“Showing off your patches, visible menders say, draws attention to the way a garment’s lifespan has been extended,” wrote Steven Kurutz in a New York Times story on the rise of visible mending. “It also subverts the notion, long held, that mended clothes are worn by the poor, while the height of luxury is buying a new wardrobe every season.”

Visible mending is one way to draw attention to the meaningful extension of life, and designer, tailor, and mender Makayla Wray brings the practice into even more discernible territory: Manhattan. Wray works part-time with the luxury menswear label Bode, where since 2018 she has been making gulpworthy one-of-a-kind coats, shirts, and trousers out of recycled and salvaged materials. When the pandemic hit New York, she filled her newfound spare time in an inspired manner: having worked as a barista for mobile coffee cart, Peddler, Wray retrofitted a classic New York Nuts4Nuts cart into a tiny sewing studio, featuring a welded-on ironing board. In Spring 2020, Wray set up her cart in Soho and stayed there all summer, rain or shine, offering mending (button fixes were hugely popular) and custom work, like a plush elephant made out of Jim’s flannel shirt, a man who had passed away from COVID. His wife Helen (who turned out to be Wray’s LES neighbour) commissioned the elephant as a way of literally holding onto something of her husband’s in a new form.

While Wray doesn’t practice visible mending to the degree that Eggenburg does, her mending itself is visible, as people often stop to watch her work or chat about what she’s doing. Fashion students seek advice and home sewers borrow spools of thread. Wray helps all of them. Having worked in grueling factory settings where labour is invisible to the consumer and workers are treated as extensions of their machines, Wray puts a vital human face on the hunched, squinting labour (and love) that goes into garment production and maintenance.

I understand this firsthand, you see, having ponderously darned my first sock about ten minutes ago. Consulting Hikaru Noguchi’s manual, Darning: Repair, Make, Mend, I remembered, or re-remembered the wisdom that I could feel in my hands: an instinct towards being careful. “I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head,” writes Heidi Julavits in her memoir, The Folded Clock. Julavits was articulating how the process of writing helps her know what she knows, but it occurred to me, while damply clutching a wooden darning egg, that mending offers a similar passage from hand to head and back again.

Mending, especially the visible, requires a certain amount of vigilance in order to avoid making a big old mess. I want my darn to look decent, and more than that, for it to work. And it did! Well, the latter. I put the sock on, and marveled at how smooth it felt. Periodically throughout the afternoon, I checked out my heel in the mirror as if admiring a fetching new haircut. It was very, very ugly, and I loved it.

If darning (and visible mending in general) exists on a continuum from unsightly but effective to god-level and effective, then knitwear designer and visible mender Flora Collingwood-Norris in on the god-level tier and I’m waving at her from the cavernous pit below. Her darned knits often take the shape of tiny and meticulous plaids, edges melting fluidly into the original garment. To see visible mending of this caliber is to gawp at the genius of one person’s hands. For a nominal fee, you can download her manuals on specific kinds of darning like micro weaving, Swiss and Scotch darning, and darning for cuffs and edges.

Collingwood-Norris was first moved to try visible mending in 2010 when she discovered the work of Celia Pym, a London-based artist whose pieces explore sewing and damaged textile repair in exquisite ways. “When we mend our clothes, we start to appreciate the work that has gone into making them,” Collingwood-Norris tells me. “My hope is that it sparks some thought about how long that garment took to make, what fibers were used, who made it and what conditions they worked in.” Perhaps by maintaining someone else’s labour, our future purchasing decisions might change.

On Pym’s own Instagram account, she shares her makings, plus treasured books like Roland L. Freeman’s A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories. Among other things, sharing techniques, tools, and stories is an inherent part of the mending tradition. But that can come with an appropriation of techniques that visible mending’s tradition of grab-all eclecticism may at times unintentionally mishandle; practices like Japanese Sashiko, which has its own specific history, design, material use, and cultural legacy. In this way, mending is as new as it is old, and the movement will continue to revise itself as it expands.

“If we open ourselves to their fungal attractions, matsutake can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times,” writes Lowenhaupt Tsing. Visible mending, from patching to Sashiko to darning, turns our hands into the force that drives mushrooms from the earth, feeding on natural decay, waste, and destruction—much of which we have created ourselves thanks to our endless appetites and the forces that encourage us to fulfill them. Similarly, if we open ourselves to the attractions of visible mending, we may begin to feel like collaborators in the larger effort towards our survival, and certainly with fewer holes in our socks.

Naomi Skwarna is based in Toronto, Canada.