Abstract

Mending is undergoing a revival. Though the handwork practice of stitching visible repairs into personal garments is fashionable enough today to be widely emulated in industrial product, it has largely escaped formal analysis. This article addresses that gap by defining and contextualizing novel modes of dress-mending using registers of political resistance, craft, fashion, new materialism, and metaphysics. Released from historical bounds of invisible, gendered labor and subsistence strategy, mending can be understood as a transdisciplinary branch of scholarship with roots and relationships in and outside fashion discourse. Within fashion, and expanding on the literature to date, mending is in conversation with histories of vernacular dress, “bias grain” textile research, object-based affective study, and auto-ethnographic experimental methodologies. Ultimately, theorizing the fusion of mending and fashion exposes fissures in supposed degrowth strategies of sustainability and circularity in production-consumption systems. Mending becomes a powerful regenerative technology with metaphorical valence, offering a glimpse of radical, and hopeful, futurities.