Mending as a visible act

Repair was, until very recently, the normal fate of a damaged object. Manufactured goods were expensive relative to labour, so fixing something was almost always cheaper than replacing it, and every community had people who did it.

Some of those repair traditions have become well known, and the way they are discussed now tends to emphasise philosophy over practice.

Ceramic repair with lacquer and gold

The Japanese technique widely known as kintsugi joins broken ceramic with lacquer and dusts the seams with powdered gold, silver or other metal, producing a visible network of lines across the mended object.

The material logic is straightforward: urushi lacquer is a genuinely effective adhesive that cures to a hard, water-resistant, food-safe finish, and it was the available option. The metal powder decorates a seam that would otherwise be a dark line.

The philosophical framing that has attached to it — about embracing imperfection and about a history of damage being part of an object's value — is present in the tradition and it is not the whole of it. There is also the fact that good ceramics were expensive, that tea utensils in particular carried enormous value, and that a repaired vessel with a documented history was worth keeping.

Other ceramic repair traditions exist and are less celebrated. Staple repair — drilling holes either side of a crack and fitting metal staples across it — was used across Europe, China and elsewhere, and it is a purely functional technique that leaves an equally visible result.

Textile mending

The most widespread repair tradition, because textiles wear out constantly and were expensive.

Darning weaves new thread across a hole, reconstructing the fabric structure. Done well it is nearly invisible; done quickly it is not, and both were normal depending on the garment.

Patching, where a piece of cloth is applied over damage. Simple, fast, and the accumulation of patches over a garment's life produces a record of where it wore.

Sashiko, the Japanese running-stitch technique, was developed for reinforcing and repairing work clothing, layering and quilting cloth to extend its life and add warmth. The geometric patterns that make it decorative are a consequence of a functional stitch used systematically.

Boro, the accumulated result — garments and covers built up from many layers of patched and re-patched cloth over generations. These are now collected and exhibited, and it is worth being clear that they were the products of poverty. The people who made them would not have chosen to.

The other repair trades

Most are entirely forgotten and each employed people.

Tinkers repairing metal vessels. Cobblers resoling. Knife grinders working a circuit. Chair caners. Umbrella menders. Basket menders. People who reblocked hats, turned collars, relined coats and rewove damaged carpet.

These trades disappeared when manufactured replacements became cheaper than the labour of repair, which happened at different points for different objects across roughly the last century.

The economics that ended it

The relationship that determines whether repair happens is simple: the cost of the repair against the cost of replacement.

Industrial production collapsed replacement costs while labour costs rose, and the ratio inverted for most objects. Repair became uneconomic, then unavailable as the trades disappeared, then impossible as products were designed in ways that make it difficult.

The last of those is the part that has become politically contested. Products that are glued rather than screwed, that use proprietary fasteners, that require parts only available to authorised repairers, or that are software-locked, are not simply cheap — they are constructed in ways that prevent repair.

The current movement

Repair cafés, community workshops and right-to-repair campaigning have grown substantially, driven by environmental concern and by the plain irritation of being unable to fix something obviously fixable.

Legislation in several jurisdictions has begun requiring availability of parts, manuals and diagnostic access for certain product categories. The scope is limited and it is a genuine change from a decade ago.

The obstacles are real. Some products genuinely are hard to repair for engineering reasons. Skills have been lost. And the economics still favour replacement for most items, which no amount of enthusiasm changes.

What visible mending is doing now

The current interest in visible mending — deliberately conspicuous repair on clothing — is a different thing from the traditions it borrows from, and worth describing accurately.

Historical visible mending was visible because hiding it was not worth the effort, or because the person had no better option. Contemporary visible mending is visible as a statement, made by people who could afford to replace the garment.

That is not a criticism. Making repair socially legible is probably the most useful thing the movement does, since the reason people replace rather than mend is frequently that a mended garment reads as poverty.

It is worth being straightforward about the difference, though, particularly when the aesthetic is borrowed from traditions that arose from genuine hardship.