Marium Durrani
Through the Threaded Needle
A multi-sited ethnography on the sociomateriality of garment mending practices
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Through
the threaded needle presents an in-depth nuanced discussion on the
practice of garment mending. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, mending
is traced across four cities to explore what communal garment repair
events can tell us about how menders perform, learn and sustain their
practice. In bringing forth the complexities laden within the practices
of menders, the notion of understanding through an examination of the
interlaced and entangled relations between social and material forces is
embraced.
As a
backlash to the ‘throw away’ culture of fast fashion, recent years have
witnessed the emergence of various public garment mending events in
Western countries. Although academic interest in mending has been
growing among fashion researchers, their focus has remained limited to
an exploration of perspectives on mending in domestic spaces. Marium Durrani's work
proposes to make a shift towards an examination of
the processes undertaken to mend by studying existing off-the-grid
communal mending practices that run parallel to mainstream fast-fashion
systems. In so doing, the study highlights the broader implications of
mending that need attention in the current sustainable fashion discourse
and invites future research to actively challenge fast fashion dictates
towards the practices of caring, inclusivity and stewardship.