There’s lots of good resources on the history and practice of mending. Here’s a very abbreviated reading and viewing list:
- Mending Matters: Stitch, Patch and Repair your favorite denim and more by Katrina Rodabaugh. Beautiful book for ideas and skills in denim patching
- Always, always Tom of Holland‘s Visible Mending Programme, and a delightful interview in zine Sew Irregular issue #2.
- Reissue of the World War II era British mending pamphlets “Make Do and Mend” with 2013 forward. Explore one of the original pamphlets with the British Library.
- “Repair and Design Futures” at RISD Museum (open till June 30, 2019) good, small survey of mending practices from around the globe.
- “Fashion Unraveled” exhibit at Museum at FIT stunning past exhibit of altered clothing and flawed objects
- Vintage Mending Samplers from the Victoria and Albert Museum textile collection and a brief essay on the history of samplers.
- Documentary film “The True Cost” on the rise and destruction of fast fashion.
A few major companies, including Eileen Fisher and Patagonia ,are integrating mending into their sustainable business practices.
There’s are a few folks now in the academic world studying mending. I recommend these essays:
- Dr. Anna König of Arts University Bournmouth on A Stitch in Time: Changing Cultural Constructions of Craft and Mending
- Dr. Anna König of Arts University Bournmouth on Luxury, quality and sustainability: untangling a complex relationship
- The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine by Rozsika Parker. Academic study of how embroidery and stitching samplers has been used to constrain and subvert feminine identities.
- I’m reading this book now ” Fray: Art and Textile Politics” by Julia Bryan-Wilson of University of California Berkeley
Mending Church 