How to ‘repair’ repair? A conceptual model to escalate repair as urgent or important

Abstract

Globally, the volume of clothing waste is now catastrophic in scale. Further, the manufacturing sector of fast fashion garments will soon produce over 100 billion garments per year. Fast fashion promotes wastefulness – during clothing production, laundering and the quick discard of used and even new clothing to landfills throughout the world. This article presents a model for the mechanism of repair to become activated as ‘urgent’ and ‘important’. Firstly, repair can be activated by the vector of trauma. Urgency comes through the exigencies of two life experiences, when trauma follows natural disaster and/or climate change. As summarized in the section on the environmental costs from fashion overproduction, natural disasters and climate change have impacted severely on global communities. In addition, trauma occurs when people’s lives are ‘disenfranchised’ outside the norms of social well-being. These marginal communities include refugees, migrant workers, trafficked slaves, prisoners and discrimination by race, colour, gender, sexual identity, religion and more. Secondly, repair can be activated through the vector of value. Clothing is cherished and repaired because of initial cost, sentimentality and family history. Here clothing encapsulates a process of nostalgia; from a mindset of ‘casting back’ where garments are indelibly linked to memories. This conceptual model for ‘repairing’ repair is not lightly proposed. Complications can arise when repair is delegated to ‘women’s work’ that undermines feminist theories. A model can be useful, but the key to any model’s efficacy is its application to real-world activities. Fast fashion further relocates clothing to static objects, as photos viewed quickly on social media. It is postulated here that this analysis of repair as urgent and important, when driven by vectors of trauma and value offers a re-evaluation of how to relocate repair as a vital pathway to lessen global fast fashion overproduction and overconsumption.