Are sweaters knitted by grandma just a cliché? My grandma crocheted, but sadly (or thankfully), handmade articles of clothing never came my way. Sweaters produced by companies to look like grandma’s needlework, known as ugly sweaters, soar in sales during the holiday seasons. I find it depressing that most ugly sweaters include an image of knitted designs on them, rather than true needlework. Consumers purchase factory woven sweaters, with plastic decals of intricately knitted deer melted on top. What has clothing become?
Plastics and chemicals produce the outfits we wear today. This mass production enables us to own a variety of clothes to fit our style. Clothes create a person’s entire personality, or at least show off aspects of it. If you like pink, everyone will know. If you fangirl over the Rolling Stones or Final Fantasy 4, you may choose to tell the world; you just need a shirt with that brand on it to wear around in public. Shirts and pants that reflect identity predates pop culture, but this idea of identity shifted over time.
From Past to Present
At the start of the early 1800s, white fabric gained popularity by European women in fashion. This seems odd, right? Where are the bright colors and frilly linings? Well, white soils easily, making it the most precious color to keep pure. If you frequently wore white, this meant two things: either you can afford to constantly throw away dirtied garments or you acted ladylike enough to always keep them clean. White symbolized status in the form of wealth and cleanliness.
While the women of fashion carelessly threw away their out-of-style dresses, the middle and lower class kept their clothes for decades. They mended their garments until they looked like rags. Patchy clothing with many designs never showed up in high fashion, but the middle class still popularized the trend. Even Thomas Jefferson wore jackets with patches on them!
These days, seeing someone in public wearing patched up clothes is as rare as seeing them in public naked! Once a stain or a tear appears, the garment ends up in the trash. The Saturday Evening Post states that, “The average American throws away around 81 pounds of clothing yearly.” This fact startles us, yet most people toss it in the back of their minds, leaving it forgotten. This trend results from mass consumption.
Whether you like it or not, we all contribute to the throwaway society. Life Magazine first coined the term in 1955 and it still impacts us today. A throwaway society means that the majority of people consume excessively and produce large amounts of waste. While a lot of big changes need to occur, some small, earth friendly alternatives to clothes shopping can reduce our waste.
Alternatives to Clothes Shopping
Thrifting easily brings down your carbon footprint. Reusing outfits from the community heavily lessens the weight of waste. Recently, thrifting comes off as nifty and fun. Many teenagers go out with friends and try on unusual garments not found in any other stores, while looking for shirts that fit their style.
Finding sustainable clothing brands to shop from also helps lessen the consumption. Some brands use less plastics and more organic materials, while others lessen the chemicals needed in their manufacturing process. The Good Trade provides a list of different brands, including important information such as price range and ethics.
One of the harder solutions—but probably the best—would be patching up clothes when they tear instead of throwing them away. Many free online learning materials exist on YouTube and Pinterest just for sewing. If every American learned the art of needlework, instead of throwing away 81 pounds of clothing each year, only a few pounds of irreparable clothes would end up trashed. Patching up garments saves money due the need to purchase less clothes. This option also works with either one from above. Why not thrift a pretty shirt with a hole, repair it, and wear it for years?
So, if repairing clothes yields the least amount of waste, why not do it? Why does no one carry a needle and thread with them incase their jacket rips on a door? I started pursuing this specific path to sustainability, and quite a few bumps snagged me on the way.
My Experience with Sewing
To start off, the only thing taught to me in school, regarding sewing, involved producing a pillow with a sewing machine. This weeklong excursion was my only practice with a needle until this year, when I picked up embroidery.
Embroidery is the McDonalds of art supplies, so cheap! The costs consisted of hoops at two bucks each, threads at 50 cents each, and the cloth at nothing (because I practiced on old shirts). The first thing to note: embroidery takes up a lot of time and requires technical skill. Hours go into making a small, delicate flower. Even with so much time spent, problems arise with each design. Sometimes the thread knots onto itself; sometimes the needle goes through the thread in an awkward position. Do not even get me started on creating accurate, straight lines.
Like every other skill, the more you practice, the easier it becomes. After 3 months, big messy knots in the thread only happened occasionally, but straight lines still appeared wavy. I embroidered a bird for my mom, which took over a month (still time consuming), and I felt accomplished. The colors worked well together, and the needlework looked quite exquisite to me.
With this ego boost, I decided to take up another project: repairing my boyfriend’s lovely plaid shirt, which just teared a little on the sleeve. I flipped the shirt inside out and investigated the situation. The job seemed a wee bit more complicated than originally anticipated; the tear spanned over multiple colors. I picked a dark blue thread because it related to the colors best. Using my needle, I looped the thread over and under on each side of the split. I tightened up the stitch and tied a knot, securing my handiwork.
I flipped the shirt back to its normal state. The tear dissolved into the patterns, but the dark blue thread holding it together appeared very prominent to my eye. I failed. My boyfriend might get away with wearing this shirt in a zoom meeting, but certainly not in public.
A Realization
With this experience, I conclude that my skills seem far too inferior to properly repair most garments. In the near future, I might fix a very small tear in a solid colored fabric, but nothing more complex.
The school system failed me; it failed the younger generation. Why do our grandmas know how to sew and knit? Back when they went to school, they learned the art of needlework. When they attended class, our throwaway society just started. Ever since that lifestyle boomed, less and less kids picked up on these basic necessities.
My teacher briefly taught me how to use a sewing machine, but that knowledge left my mind; sewing machines belong in less and less homes these days. No one thinks to teach us how to sew by hand because society engulfed itself into the throwaway ideals. If we learned to knit and sew, we could make our own ugly sweaters. Sweaters that last for decades, made from earth friendly materials.
Even though sewing requires a lot of skill, people used to patch their clothes every year. Society can return to this state, the state of sustainability.
Repairing clothes should gain importance in our society. Clothes create a large amount of unnecessary waste, and the industry grows larger each day. We must counteract this by cherishing our clothes; cherishing the hard labor that went into making sustainable outfits. Patches on clothes is a thing of the past, but was the past that long ago?