Levi's, Primark Add Visible Mending to Fashion Lines

Brighton, United Kingdom — Clothing retailers including Levi's, Primark, Ralph Lauren and Shein are selling or displaying garments with deliberately visible repairs this year, as a mending trend that began in hobby workshops reaches high-street shelves and designer catwalks, the BBC reports.

When Did the Visible Mending Trend Begin?

The trend took off roughly six years ago, according to Jayne Eagle, who runs a Saturday morning mending workshop in Brighton, England, and says interest has "boomed since." Eagle traces the loss of mending skills to an era of "throwaway" fast fashion dating from the 1980s, and describes the current revival as a response to overproduction in the clothing industry, including its pollution, carbon emissions, water use and labour conditions, per the BBC.

What Does Visible Mending Actually Look Like?

At Eagle's Brighton classes, students learn to stitch patches behind tears so a decorative shape — a cat face, for instance — peeps through the hole, and to apply Japanese-inspired Boro and Sashiko techniques using contrasting white geometric stitching rather than thread matched to the fabric. One student, Nicola, told the BBC she used the skills to stitch over sunscreen stains on a T-shirt, saying people now "stop seeing the stains and just see the decoration." Another, Lisa, said she deliberately showed off a repaired snip in a second-hand jacket: "I was actually pointing it out to people."

How Is the Trend Spreading Online?

Alice Brown, a 27-year-old forest ranger from Lincolnshire, England, has built a large online following over the past year by needle-felting small animal and insect designs onto moth holes and stains in secondhand clothing, according to the BBC. Brown said a hole positioned under the arm or on the shoulder "forces you to think about the design," rather than defaulting to the front centre of a garment.

Which Retailers Are Now Selling Mended Garments?

Brands spanning the price spectrum — from Ralph Lauren to ultra-fast-fashion retailer Shein — are currently selling clothing with mended or patch-style detailing, the BBC reports, alongside Levi's, which runs its own mending workshops, and Primark. The BBC's report does not specify sales figures or the proportion of each retailer's range devoted to mended styles.

Why Do Attitudes Toward Mended Clothes Differ by Generation?

Lisa told the BBC that her mother's generation would never have wanted a repair to show, reflecting mending's earlier association with poverty rather than style. At a Levi's-run workshop, one participant named Bianca said visible mending is still seen by some as "a sign of poverty," while another participant, Nicholas, said he prefers his own mends not to show at all — illustrating that the trend has not displaced older attitudes so much as grown alongside them, according to the BBC.

Eagle, for her part, frames the shift in generational terms: "Now part of it is being proud of what you've done," a student in her class said, describing visible mending as a public statement rather than a private economy.

Source: BBC News

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