There’s a kind of calm in repair.
A pause. A return. A small act of choosing to continue.
In a world where clothing is made to unravel — seams loosening just in time for the next season — the choice to mend feels quite radical. It resists urgency. It slows things down. It asks us to look at what we already own and wonder: can this be saved? Do I still need more?
Sometimes it’s a frayed hem. A moth-eaten sleeve. A button gone missing.
Other times, it’s a piece softened by time — too worn to wear out, too full of memory to let go.
While recycling often takes centre stage in sustainable fashion conversations, it’s not always the most effective path. It feels like progress: visible, marketable, measurable. But when we look closer — at the materials, the processes, the energy it takes — the narrative starts to shift.
Repair often does more with less.
Within circular economy thinking, not all actions carry the same weight. Strategies like reuse and repair come early in the process — preserving more value, requiring fewer resources, and avoiding the environmental cost of breaking materials down. Compared to recycling, which often occurs once a garment is already degraded, repair is a more efficient, more preventative intervention.
Recycling, by contrast, often arrives late. By the time a garment reaches that point, much of what made it valuable — the fibre integrity, the craftsmanship, the human labour — is already lost. Blended textiles are difficult to process. Many are downcycled into rags or insulation. In most cases, only a small fraction is recovered in a meaningful way.
That’s not to say recycling isn’t important — it is. But it’s often too romanticised. Too easily celebrated without addressing the deeper systems that cause overproduction in the first place.
Repair, meanwhile, rarely gets the spotlight. It doesn’t scale neatly. It doesn’t generate the same revenue. It requires time, intention, and sometimes skill. It doesn’t feed the product pipeline — it pauses it. And that, for many business models, is uncomfortable.
In many industrialised economies, repair is framed as niche or inconvenient. Services are sparse. Skills are fading. Often, replacing a garment costs less than fixing it. This reveals a larger design flaw in the system itself:
Who gets access to affordable repair?
Who is taught to mend?
Who is encouraged to throw things away?
If we are to take circular fashion seriously, repair must be more than a side note. It needs support — in schools, in shops, in policies. It should be visible. Affordable. Celebrated. And normal.
Clothing is not disposable technology. It is something to be used, worn, fixed, and worn again.
And repair is not a sentimental act. It’s a functional, forward-thinking response to material overuse. It reduces environmental pressure, honours the resources already used, and keeps products in active use — which, in practice, is one of the most sustainable outcomes we can hope for.
Because fashion’s crisis won’t be solved by more production, even if it’s recycled.
It starts by learning how to work with what we already have — and choosing to keep things going, when we can.
It’s a clear, grounded strategy — one of the simplest ways to slow the flow of waste and reimagine how we live with the things we wear.
Circular fashion isn’t built on newness. It starts with what we already have — and how we choose to take care of it.