Fast fashion has made it too easy to throw away and replace clothing that could simply be fixed. These brands are helping to change that
"I don’t think we should be producing anything new at all," says Maja Frieman, co-founder of Main Nué, a brand which takes fashion cast offs and resurrects them. She is zooming me from her studio in Stockholm, surrounded by boxes and boxes of old clothes and sewing paraphernalia. This is where the magic happens. This is where clothes go to get a new life.
At first glance, it is not so different from the second-hand warehouses Frieman and her co-founder Alva Johansson both work in for charitable organisations in Sweden. Though they first met studying at the Swedish School of Textiles, it was their experiences with these donated clothes which shaped them. "I knew about the whole process of the second-hand industry and how much things there are just lying around," she says, and notes that she also focused her graduation project on repairing clothes. "I started weaving directly into garments and then I just realised that that's essentially mending, like, you know, when you repair old socks."
‘Essentially mending’ could be Main Nué’s slogan. They take cast offs and fashion new pieces, as well as doing personal commissions. You can take in your favourite pair of ripped jeans or a beloved stained dress, and Main Nué will not only repair it, but ‘give it a new spin.’ It is, Freiman notes, her favourite part of the job. "At least you know someone is going to keep wearing it again and again. That’s what we should all be doing with our clothes."
Slow fashion is a growing trend which speaks directly to our desire to lead a more sustainable existence. Yet making considered choices in our sartorial purchases is just the start. We should be more engaged with the life cycle of our clothes; we should be looking closely at fabric, durability and longevity. We should, crucially, be looking at rather old-fashioned yet sustainable concepts: tailoring, repairing, the old ‘mend and make do.’ Why buy new clothes when you could repair them?
Scandinavia is fast growing its list of brands, tailors and apps offering these services. In fact, much like The Seam and SOJO in the UK, tailoring is one of the latest services to be given the ‘Deliveroo’ or ‘Uber’ treatment. If we are going to be sustainable in this day and age, we need to make sure it is also as easy to do so as possible: the fashion may be slow, but the service needn’t be.
Enter Repamera, an ingenious app and online provider, which collects your broken or old clothes and connects with the tailors and menders you need to rejuvenate or fix your beloved items before sending them back to you – all at the touch of a few buttons. "Our most popular repairs are mending zippers and fixing trouser crotches," says Sofie Magnusson, who works with Repamera’s customer service. "One of the main reasons we do all of this is to show how simple it is to get your clothes repaired and we also want to break the stigma of wearing mended clothes – make it socially acceptable to wear something old and repaired, because it is the more sustainable thing to do."
Magnusson points out that the service – which is operational in Sweden and Denmark – proves that your key capsule items have many, many lives in them. "There are a lot of things you can do to give things a second chance," she says. "Turn a jacket into a vest, sew bags of old jeans parts, use an old scarf to reinvent an old bag strap, make trousers that are too small for you into shorts, turn shirts into short sleeved shirts. There are so many options!"
Making repairs fashionable is a keystone of Oslo-based brand Hekne, which has a free repair service embedded into its already sustainable offerings. The brand makes its pieces from waste material collected in Europe, including recycled yarn which has a 98 per cent lower environmental impact than most brand new varieties. The idea is that you may buy a new Hekne product (itself already sustainable) but you will return again and again to have it stitched and spruced up, ensuring its longevity.
"We offer free repair on any Hekne garment, no matter when it was purchased or why it's broken," says brand spokesman David Mikkelsen. "We work with high quality standards for materials and production, we keep the designs classic and timeless – all to make the garments last long and to contribute to slowing down the pace in the consumption of clothing. We believe the industry has to offer easy and effortless ways to help consumers make better choices for themselves and for nature, and repair services should be one of them. We also repurpose clothes through a return service, because we honestly believe that someone who's creative enough to design clothing should be able to find better solutions than throwing them away when they are not perfect anymore."
Hekne's mission extends to proselytising around repair work, Mikkelsen says. "In addition to offering repair workshops, we also want to inspire people through social media by showing them fun and creative ways to repair beautifully and easily. The same goes for our upcycled items – every time we design one, it comes with instructions on how to do it yourself. Our hope is that this will inspire and save more garments from ending up in the trash."
This is also the aim of Oslo’s Studio Mend, founded by design graduate Sunniva Amber Flesland. "It started out as a studio which primarily offers visible repairs for customers, but it has grown into having more focus on teaching others to repair through workshops," she explains. "I find it gives me greater joy to see the knowledge spread and seeing that people are inspired to take the techniques into their own hands and be proud and more confident that they can give their clothing a longer life and beautiful details."
Flesland is determined to use her studio as a battleground for making repairs cool again, after being horrified by the ever-increasing levels of garment waste. Fashion is already one of climate change’s biggest contributors, making it all the more important that we do our bit by simply buying less and repairing more.
"We shouldn't underestimate the fact that repair was sort of forgotten for a while, perhaps because clothing became so cheap that it costs less to buy new instead of repairing," she says. "Not enough people know how to repair, or where to go. We should be offering more and showing the aesthetic potentials of repair. We should be making it an attractive option."