Much of my writing has been about the questions my grant work has brought up, mostly centering around “how do I bring this to my classroom?” I have been experimenting with teaching methods and content all along, but bringing repair into the classroom was one idea I was very intent on. This was for a multitude of reasons from making students more independent, to honoring the makers of our consumer culture, to questioning consumer culture, to just developing a sense of pride in one’s own abilities. All of this was very much inspired by my conversations with Joanna Van Der Zanden (see blog post: What If We Saw Repair as an Honor? My conversation with Joanna van der Zanden
(https://asafford4.wixsite.com/sdanded/home/what-if-we-saw-repair-as-an-honor-my-conversation-with-joanna-van-der-zanden) and all I had learned from the people I spoke to in the Dutch fashion industry.
An obvious place to start investigating repair in the classroom was my Wearable Art class. It ties into much of what I had seen in Amsterdam about the toxic fashion and textile industries, a topic that the students are waking up to. Also, CSW students have a serious and skilled thrift shop culture.
I introduced the idea of a Repair Workshop at the beginning of the module (CSW has 6 6-week modules instead of traditional semesters), and the idea was met with more enthusiasm than I had expected. The students had many loved garments that were in need of repair.
The day of the Repair Workshop I showed them images of creative repair, and we talked about it in the context of throw-away culture vs. what our grandparents and great grandparents had done. We also talked about it as global citizens, as well as owners of garments that can have meaning.
I shared this new-found quote, that I find particularly powerful, revealing that the act of repair is about more than saving money:
Writer Elizabeth Spelman has provocatively and insightfully described repair as “the creative destruction of brokenness.”*
They brought objects that had meaning (a teddy bear), or that simply needed to be resized. One student brought in a flowered pair of sneakers his mother had been begging him to throw away, but he simply liked them too much.
For students who didn’t have anything to bring in, I had acquired some cashmere sweaters that moths had gotten to from the local Everything Free JP Facebook group, a group sprouting out of the Buy Nothing movement (there is likely one in your area, check them out). Some of the most interesting repair I have seen on the internet has been the felted repair of moth holes. The students went beyond much of what I had seen, felting smiley faces, flowers, and even a blue skull which was skillfully rendered.
It was a chaotic (we used so many different techniques depending on the repair) but rewarding day. The outcome was heartening: students wanted to continue their projects, the repaired formerly moth-eaten sweaters were in high demand, and repair will be the theme of some extracurricular classes I teach in the spring due to popular demand.
The time is right to pay attention and tend to our clothing, and how we consume them.
* quote from text for show at RISD on Design as Repair:
Originally from: Elizabeth V. Spelman, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 134.
Links if you are interested in knowing more:
My Wearable Art and Repair Pinterest:
Platform 21's Design Manifesto:
Tom of Holland, sweater repairer extraordinaire:
Ifixit, website dedicated to repair as a pragmatic skill, and also all the consumer and political implications. They are aiming to create a library of free repair manuals "for every device":
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