On the mend: 8 tips on how to repair your clothes

November 26, 2025·31 min·2 clips

Textile artist Arona Kunaraj describes how her immigrant mother hid every mend out of poverty shame — and how Arona now celebrates visible holes as traces of the person who wore the garment.

1. Outside/In producer Justine Paradis reports on the practice of clothing repair, presenting eight tips for keeping clothes out of landfills through mending rather than replacement or donation. 2. Host Nate Hedgie introduces the episode; Paradis reports and narrates throughout, with contributions from fashion writer Amelia Petrarca, textile artist Arona Kunaraj, Toast repair specialist Dante Gonzalez, cobbler Steve Foss, and repair cafe organizer Ali Man. 3. The episode argues that repair is the missing fourth R after reduce, reuse, recycle — and that the most sustainable garment is always the one already in your closet. 4. Nate Hedgie opens by proposing what he calls a 'geologic theory of wardrobes,' distinguishing topsoil favorites from special-occasion pieces in the distance, and a deeper 'permapile' of loved clothes that haven't been worn because they need fixing. 5. Amelia Petrarca, a Brooklyn-based fashion writer who runs the ShopRat newsletter, describes reaching 'shopping fatigue' by January each year and launching an annual Repair Month on her newsletter to cover practical skills like sewing a button or caring for cashmere. 6. The episode cites researcher data showing the fashion industry accounts for 10% of the world's carbon footprint, making it the second largest industrial source after aviation. 7. A 2014 dataset shows the average North American buys 35 pounds of clothing per year, equivalent to 64 t-shirts or 16 pairs of jeans; a UK study found most garments are worn just seven times total before disposal. 8. The episode notes that only about one-fifth of donated clothing is actually worn by new owners — the rest ends up in landfills in African countries or floods secondhand markets in ways that damage local clothing economies. 9. Tip one advises a closet audit to identify the permapile and make a repair pile rather than defaulting to donation; tip two reframes laundry skill as a repair practice, with Petrarca offering stain-removal tips including cornstarch for oil, saliva for blood, and dish soap as a general pinch tool. 10. Dante Gonzalez, a costume designer and repair specialist at UK-based clothing brand Toast, advises starting with repairs under two hours and under one square inch — specifically cautioning against attempting to darn 300 moth holes in one sitting. 11. Cobbler Steve Foss, who operates Main Shoe Repair out of his garage and has worked at it for almost 40 years, is described as both the best and worst cobbler in town because he is the only one; a re-sole cost $20 versus buying new boots. 12. The episode notes that EU regulations effective fall 2025 require textile producers to share more data and fund textile waste collection and recycling, with a similar California law passed in 2024 — framing brand repair programs as driven by policy rather than corporate altruism. 13. Textile artist Arona Kunaraj, whose family immigrated to Canada from Laos after the Vietnam War, describes her seamstress mother mending clothes invisibly to avoid the stigma of poverty — then explains her own visible mending practice as a deliberate reversal of that shame. 14. Visible mending uses colorful stitches, elaborate embroidery over stains, patches over holes, and Japanese sashiko embroidery techniques to turn repair marks into decorative features that celebrate the garment's history of use. 15. Paradis describes her own experience darning holes in sweaters as satisfying — a puzzle at 'the perfect level of difficulty' that deepens her relationship with garments, and notes she posts before-and-after photos on Instagram. 16. Dante Gonzalez articulates a repair philosophy: 'I can fix it. I will fix it. It will break again. I will fix it again. I can do hard things and I can do them gently.' This framing treats repair as an ongoing relationship with objects rather than a one-time fix. 17. The episode visits Ripe for Repair, a monthly Portland, Maine meetup modeled on the international repair cafe movement, where volunteers fix clothing, a blueberry-picking stool, and a broken Roku with no payment involved. 18. Organizer Ali Man describes the event as designed to build community across lines of race, class, and generation by creating a low-stakes, non-commercial space to share skills — noting that home economics and shop classes have sharply declined, leaving many people without repair skills or the sense they are capable of fixing things. 19. People interested in practical sustainability, fashion criticism, or community-building through craft will find this episode useful and emotionally engaging. 20. Listeners hoping for radical or systemic critique of the fashion industry will find the episode optimistic and solution-focused rather than structural in its analysis.

As heard by us

A repair-focused Outside/In episode that turns the closet into a funny, recognizable map of attachment.

Outside/In makes a clothing-repair topic feel immediate by opening with how people keep and sort what they wear. Nate Hedgie and Justine Paradis use a playful geologic theory of wardrobes to map the pieces kept close at hand, the special-occasion items pushed farther back, and…

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Why you'd press play

For the shirt you keep meaning to fix instead of retiring.

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