Patches on Patches

You’ll have to excuse my unscheduled political mini-rant this afternoon: I’ve been busy mending clothes and have something to say about it. I have one pair of jeans in particular that have been in my possession for over 20 years now and have been patched at least a dozen times. While I’m glad that visible mending is in fashion at the moment, that is hardly the motivation for this work.

I mend my clothes as a political statement.

This may seem like a silly approach to take. Many of the patches aren’t even visible. As far as political statements go, it’s a fairly silent one and I recognize how insignificant that may seem at a time when political statements need to be loud and out there.

But the time that I spend mending is still important to me. It reminds me that there are tangible ways that individual actions can be important inside of the larger movement of change slowly taking place. Each stitch enforces what I know to be true: I don’t have to rely on oppressive, harmful systems to have my basic needs met.

Mending and wearing these clothes is another way that I can say: fuck fast fashion and throw away culture, fuck sweatshops and slave labour, fuck endless resource extraction and fuck shopping culture and fuck gender norms that tell me what clothes I should wear. Fuck class division and all of these oppressive systems around consumptive behaviour. I don’t want them and I don’t need them and I will find other ways to exist that don’t make me feel like shit when I have to participate in them.

This isn’t a guilt post: it is a reminder. It is permission to do things differently and reject a culture that is hell bent on self-destruction at all cost. Some folks will tell you that individual actions don’t matter because change needs to be systemic but no change will come without alternative systems being born in their place, so mending and growing food and questioning authority and building community and rejecting all these harmful pieces of colonial capitalist culture in whatever way makes sense for you makes all the difference in the world.

Don’t let anyone tell you those patches make you look less than. Wear them with pride and as a political statement that another world is possible.