Happy International Women’s Day!
Mending has baggage. Patched clothing speaks of shame and poverty and drudgery, even of slavery. But mending is a big word. It’s about repairing more than clothes. History, for example, which must be unpicked and remade, healing systemic injustice, making reparations, exposing scars. Clothes historians do this via what we wear, which turns out to be more important than we realized. Visible menders do it literally, by stitching new stories onto the worn fabric of our lives. They’re just clothes, but if enough people adopted more creative ways of sourcing, tending, and mending them, we’d fix much that’s wrong with the world.
Kate Sekules in “MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto”
Of course, its association with fleeting passions and women’s work has rendered fashion and easy target for mockery, but the truth is that it cuts a much more serious figure in the great scheme of things, and today’s fashion industry is hiding some pretty dark secrets behind a fasade of gloss and glamour. (…) Our ready to wear has turned into ready-to-waste. Karl Marx one said that religion is the opiate of the masses – to upgrade this concept, today’s consumerism is our crack cocain.
It is wrong to think of sustainability as just another passing trend; the truth is very much the opposite: Sustainability has been trending for billions of years, it is essential to our survival and our evolution. Sustainability is about balance, quality and respect; it denies us nothing and provides us with everything. It speaks of gratefulness instead of exploitation.
(…) Throughout history, clothes have been regularly trashed, unpicked, resewn, rejuvenated, reconditioned, cut up, repurposed, revived, re-worn, remade, because, until recently, frugality and efficiency made economic sense. (…) Unfortunately, rather than celebrating the creativity and the craft of maintaining, we have always focused on the shame and poverty and need.
Orsola de Castro in “Loved Clothes Last – How the joy of Rewearing and Repairing Your Clothes can b a Revolutionairy Act”
This new wave is democratizing strikes and expanding their scope – above all, by broadening the very idea of what counts as “labour”. Refusing to limit that category to waged work, women’s strike activism is also withdrawing housework, sex and smiles. By making visible the indispensable role played by gendered, unpaid work in capitalist society, it draws attention to activities from which capital benefits, but for which it does not pay.
(…) by redefining what counts as “work” and who counts as “worker,” it rejects capitalism’s structural undervaluation of women’s labour – both paid and unpaid. All told, women’s strike feminism anticipates the possibility of a new unprecedented phase of class struggle: feminist, internationalist, environmentalist, and anti-racist.
Feminisme for de 99 prosentene – Et Manifest
Antoine De Lavoisier, considered to be the father of modern chemistry, said that in nature, nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, but everything is transformed.
Everything you have ever owned, and thrown, is still here, in one shape or another: either enriching someone else’s life, because it is true that one person’s trash can be another person’s treasure, or poisoning a landfill close to your home, or close to somebody else’s home.”
In Kantamanto, 30,000 people work six days a week to sell, repair, clean, and upcycle the Global North’s clothing waste. This should be applauded, but it should not be romanticized.
(…) I remember the first time a brand referred to our research findings as a “goldmine.” It was last April and they were talking about the waste from Kantamanto. Hearing this from one of the largest fashion brands on the planet and from a member of their sustainability team, no less, sent my heart into my gut. It confirmed the fears that provoked my not-for-profit to launch Dead White Man’s Clothes (and to name our project as such) in 2016, while simultaneously making me wonder if sharing it so publicly would end up doing more harm than good.
For our Ghanaian team members, the word “goldmine” stings. It evokes an immediate connection to the Gold Coast Colony—a name given to many diverse West African nations by foreigners. It is a phrase that speaks to the historical exploitation of mineral resources and of human life. (…) It is a reminder that little has changed since the recent time of formal colonization. The minds of foreigners are still capable of collapsing all the richness that Ghana represents into an extraction site for foreign benefit.
(…) This has everything to do with profit and nothing to do with impact: A clothing company that calls itself “circular” while continuing to overproduce is not interested in solving the problem—it is interested in extracting profit from the problem.
Liz Ricketts in This is Not Your Goldmine. This is Our Mess. highsnobiety.com
What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.
Margaret Thatcher
Interview for Sunday Times 1981
“According to Verhaeghe, the neoliberal ideology is in direct opposition to the evolutionary social human, as it nourishes our least empathetic qualities, such as egotism and selfishness. And if a neoliberal economy is built on the idea that we as humans are egotistical in our core, and creates economical incentives on that foundation, we may very well increasingly become that. Therefore, says Verhaeghe, who we are, and what kind of people we are, always depends on the context we’re living in.
For within a human lies the potential for egotism and altruism, but it is the world surrounding it that will draw out the characteristics that are given the most attention. What characteristics do we currently nourish and draw out? Verhaeghe has no doubt:
“After several decades as a scientist and therapist I’ve become convinced that economical changes has a substantial impact, not only on our values, but also our personalities. 30 years of neoliberal thinking, free markets and privatisation is beginning to wear us out when accomplishments have become the norm. The consequence of this chase after accomplishments can be challenging for each and every one of us.”
(…) We are frequently told that we work less than ever. But keep in mind: A typical Norwegian post war family collectively contributed with 45 hours of labour outside of the home on a weekly basis. After women entered the paid labour force a Norwegian family today contributes with about 70 hours of paid labour a week. That is an increase of more than 25 hours in just one generation. Even though each of us have shorter work days than one or two generations ago, we are, collectively, working increasingly more and more hours outside of the home. (…) there are forces at work that want us to see the welfare state as a luxury, and who wants us to want to take on more paid work, that we will perceive that as the only sensible option.
(…) It is also worth noting that the work many of us do is strictly not needed, within sections of advertisement, marketing and sales, for example. Odd as it may be, many of these professions make a great deal more than the professions we really can’t do without in society, such as nursing, renovation, cleaning, health care or schools and kindergardens. That is exactly how the market works. It doesn’t adapt according to human needs – only the needs of the market.
Translated freely from Linn Stalsberg “Det er Nok Nå – Hvordan nyliberalismen ødelegger mennesker og natur”
Historically the one percent hasn’t cared about the interests of society or the majority, but in our day this is extra dangerous. In the onesided hunt for immediate profit they do not see the depth of the ongoing crisis, and neither how this crisis threatens capitalism itself. They would rather drill for oil today than preserve the ecological conditions necessary for their own future profits.
The result is that the crisis of today threatens life as we know it. The battle to solve this touches on the most fundamental questions regarding social organising: Where do we draw the lines when we separate economics from society, production from re-production, and work from family life. How do we distribute the surplus of what we collectively produce? And who is it, specifically, who should decide these things? Will profiteers succeed in their ambition to transform it’s opposing forces to new ways of creating private wealth? Will they succeed in a coup of the feminist revolt, while they reorganise the gender hierarchy?
Feminisme for de 99 prosentene – Et Manifest
A materials economy where waste is considered a resource is not revolutionary if this system continues to operate within a global economy built on colonial trade routes, extractive capitalism, and a growth imperative. This model will substitute waste for raw resources, but it will do so in a way that takes us down the same destructive path that we have been on.
Liz Ricketts in This is Not Your Goldmine. This is Our Mess. highsnobiety.com
Or will a mass protest against the capital finally be the action where the “passengers sitting on the train off course pull the emergency break”? And if so, will the feminists be at the front of this revolt? If we get anything to say about it, the answer to all this is yes.
Feminisme for de 99 prosentene – Et Manifest
Toril Hjorthol, describes how the market benefits from you believing you can buy your way to a better life and more desirable identity. In that way, she says, there’s a great danger that people seek solutions through therapy, that are actual political problems. This can be disguised through systemic injustice and oppression. When the ideological mantra of society is that each person is the author of hos own fortune, it’s impossible to direct your aggression at anyone but yourself. Hjorthol believes that “Greed, competition and materialism breeds insecurity, anxiety, stress and depression”
Translated freely from Linn Stalsberg “Det er Nok Nå – Hvordan nyliberalismen ødelegger mennesker og natur”
We can’t solve the climate crisis before we shake up our economic models enough that reproductive work, maintenance and care are seen as equally valuable (if not more so) than production and manufacturing of new goods.
When I spend time mending something that the market considers worthless it is to me a form of activism. I choose to respect and acknowledge the animals, water, soil, insects, people, air, all that has been affected, the labour that has been put down, the pollution that has occurred to make the garment and transported it to me. It is also about women’s history. I am placing myself in a feminist historical context and I am acknowledging that the work I do is valuable, and always has been.”
Eva Kittelsen – “An Anti- perfectionist manifesto” in FETT Tema Tekstil
[Visible Mending] is more than darning a hole. It’s a protest movement and an art form and a fashion statement. To stitch or sport a visible mend is to declare independence from the sickness of consumer culture with a beautiful scar and a badge of honour.”
Kate Sekules in “MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto”
Mending is a way to practice saying no to perfectionism; no to narrow beauty ideals, no to eternal youth. It is about learning to respect oneself, accept that we are constantly changing; that we need, and deserve restitution, and time.
Eva Kittelsen – “An Anti- perfectionist manifesto” in FETT Tema Tekstil
I say it’s about time we demand 6 hour work days, drastically lower our consumption, and increasingly value and prioritise the interhuman connection, vulneribilty, social systems and welfare we need to thrive as human beings. Let us climb down from our perfectionist, consumerist pedestals, they’re unstable and leave us lonely and trapped anyway. I’ll literally be wearing my mending as badges, and I invite you to do the same!
MENDING IS THE METHOD; the object is to change the heart and soul.
