Hey, this is Outside In a Show where Curiosity and the Natural World collide. I am Nate Hedgie joined today by our producer, Justine Paradis. Hey, Justine. Hey, Nate. Question. Yeah. How do you approach organizing your closet? Well, that's a great question because that assumes that the clothes are making it into the closet as opposed to sitting in a hamper because I can never, I hate the chore, I hate putting away laundry. But when I do, it is organized long sleeve shirts, short sleeve shirts, pants on top, folded, socks underwear, kind of hopefully folded, probably not thrown into a little bin. I mean, so I think that this speaks to a theory I've been developing that I want to lay on you. Okay. So let me present what I'm calling a geologic theory of wardrobes. Ooh, geologic theory. Okay. Thinking about your hamper, you've got your topsoil. So this is the favorite stuff, the very rich material that you wear on repeat. Hanging up, you've got a special occasion range in the distance, perhaps your party dresses, your suits. Yes. But deeper down, there is a layer of clothing that we try our best not to think about. Yeah. And these are the things that are always there. The permapile, perhaps we could call it. Oh, Justine. Any ideas? That's so clever. I love that. The permapile. The permapile. These are the clothes we love, so we don't want to throw them away, but we can't wear them as they are now because they are in some way broken. They need to be repaired. Do you know what I'm talking about? Oh, yes. I have this amazing Orca shirt. It's a Hawaiian shirt style with Orcas all over it. It's very fun. And I love the feel of it. It's soft and silky. But the buttons were put on terribly and three of them have fallen off and I've lost them. And so now it just sits hanging. You know, and I look at it and I'm like, I want to wear you, but I'm being lazy, I guess. I don't want to fix you. Yeah. I'm curious what you feel like stops you from fixing it. Oh, a lack of skill, for sure. I don't actually know how to sew. At one point in my life, I think I was taught and I quickly forgot it. Very relatable. Absolutely. Yeah. But what if I could help you bring this back to life into rotation? And what if I told you that it wouldn't be that hard? Oh, I'm all ears. Tell me. Let me fix my shirt. Let's fix these shirts. This is our subject today, the practice and sometimes the art of mending our clothes. We probably all heard the classic sustainability maxim reduce, reuse, recycle. But it is repair the missing fourth R in that sentence. So today on the show, producer Justine Parody reports on the state of repair, how clothing brands and communities are getting in on it and how you can get started yourself. A great story like Monsters Inc. stays with you forever. And Disney Plus is where you'll find your next great story from the return of the award-winning hit series, Rivals. Welcome to the naughtiest show on television. To the unmissable crime drama, High Potential. Gotta dead body, gotta go. A lifetime of great stories awaits. This spring on Disney Plus, 18 Plus, subscription required. T's and C's apply. Right now, a guide dog puppy is taking her very first steps. One day, she'll help someone with sight loss live a full and independent life. Find the crossing best. Good girl. When you sponsor a puppy with guide dogs, you're there for it all. Her wobbly walks, her first harness, the life-changing partnership. It's more than a donation, it's the start of a life-changing story. Search, sponsor a guide dog puppy and be part of a story you'll be proud to share. Guide dogs. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Justine Paradis. I feel like every November, December especially, it's gift guide season, it's sale season. There's just so much consumption happening. This is Amelia Petrarcha, a freelance fashion and culture writer based in Brooklyn. We actually had a class or two together in college, but today she writes a newsletter called Shop Rat. It's about how fashion shows up in the real world, like in person, in shops, on the street. And Amelia gets it. Fashion is fun. Obviously, I am a part of that, I am a fan of it, I love a gift guide, I love a sale. But these days, the pace of consumption is relentless and exhausting even for the pros. And while I do love it, I feel by January that I am just like, oh my god, I cannot go to the post office with another return or shipment. I have like shopping fatigue, I cannot buy anything more. So Amelia decided to explore a different aspect of fashion coverage. Now, every January on Shop Rat is repair month. She's reported on topics like how to care for cashmere, how to talk to your tailor, learning a specific sewing skill. I think last year, one of them for me was like sewing a button on a jacket. It's so easy, but I didn't know how to sew a button. And I hadn't actually taken five minutes to like watch a YouTube video. And as a result, this amazing jacket that I love went completely unworn for a year. The garment industry has a giant carbon footprint. Researchers have found that the fashion industry accounts for 10% of global pollution, the second largest industrial source after aviation. Plenty of brands do a lot of marketing around sustainability or slow fashion, which are sometimes buzzwords and sometimes reflect real change. But regardless, the most sustainable garment is always the one you already have in your closet. So this is how we're going to spend the rest of the show. Eight tips to lengthen the life of your clothes and to get the practice of repair into the rhythm of your life. Tip number one, do a closet audit. Block off an afternoon where you go through your closet. Unearth that geologic perma pile of laundry and do an inventory of everything that hasn't seen the light of day, maybe in years. Reacquaint yourself with what you have. And that is really fun for me, like doing a dress up afternoon where I put on a jeans hat and like dry everything in my closet and just be like, oh right, I have all the things that I think I lack. I've also bought like 10 of the same thing. I have sort of shopping amnesia. As you go, make a repair pile. What aren't you wearing just because it needs a simple fix? Instead of doing like giveaway toss, like think hard about what you can give another life to. Side note here real quick about the giveaway pile. Only about a fifth of clothes that we give to donation bins ends up being reworn. Most donated clothing ends up in landfills in African countries. And even if it does find its way into the second hand market, the flood of used clothing undermines local economies across the globe. So all the more reason to shift at least some of our focus onto that repair pile. I just sort of try to think ahead because a whole other season will go by where you're like, oh, I should have taken those boots to the cobbler. So yeah, take a second to take stock of your wardrobe. Tip number two, sometimes your clothes need something very simple. A wash. It's funny because like I love clothes. I work in fashion, but I am a huge slob. I actually don't take very good care of my stuff. It might not seem like it, but getting good at laundry is also a repair skill. And Amelia decided it was high time to hone hers. As a slob, I have become a sort of master stain remover. In one newsletter titled A Slob's Guide to Stains, Amelia offers a few tricks. Dish soap, baking soda, corn starch, those are your best friends. Corn starch will get out oil stains. For that corn starch thing, leave it on oil stains for at least 15 minutes, but the longer the better. Baby powder and baking soda also work well. Dish soap is good. Like in a pinch, I used it the other day when I spilled fish oil on myself. And when it comes to blood stains, Amelia has a weird but great tip. Apparently the best on the go tool is saliva. Specifically, the enzymes in your own saliva can break down your own blood, according to her source. Laundry, kind of metal. Tip number three. When you do bust out the needle and thread, start small. Pick a small one. I love an accomplishable goal. This advice comes from Dante Zagros Gonzalez, costume designer and repair specialist at the clothing brand Toast. They say, pick something you can do in under two hours in one sitting. If it's about to go, that's a great time. And something really small, like a square inch or less, is what I would recommend. Don't tackle the 300 moth holes in one sweater that you're going to swiss-darn all at once. I don't do that one first. Pick like a shirt, something hearty that's not going to fall apart if you touch it. A lot of the fundamental skills here are quite easy, but tricky to describe in a podcast. So pull up YouTube, find a video on Darning or Sashiko, both techniques which involve pretty basic sewing jobs like over-underweaving or running stitches. The goal here is to give yourself that confidence boost right off the bat. I think it's a story that people tell themselves that they're not capable of doing crafty things. I think I hear that probably the most, you know, oh my gosh, I see your work. It's so beautiful. I just, I'm not crafty. I'm not creative. And the catch-22 is that if you don't think that you can, then you won't. But the reality is that sometimes a garment might need a little more help. And that brings us to tip number four. Don't hesitate to get help from the pros. Which get going, girl? Okay, so don't be upset. I did try to glue it back myself. Oh, M.D., girlfriend. I didn't know I was using it. That's okay. I'm only kidding. I'm only kidding. This fall, when I needed to replace the soles on my black ankle boots, I didn't try to do it myself. I found a cobbler. There's a heels, heels, and more heels. Steve Foss operates main shoe repair out of his garage, and he's been at it almost 40 years. People say, you're the best in town. And I say, well, I'm also, you know, I'm the only one. So I'm also the worst in town. So I'm torn. But I said I'm very optimistic. The person's going to go the best. What's going on? It is true that Steve is the only one in town, and depending on where you live, finding a repair shop like this might not be easy. There are far fewer cobblers than there once were, and no one's waiting in the wings to take over Steve's operation. But the 20 bucks it cost to re-sole my shoes was a lot cheaper than buying a new pair. And chatting with Steve felt great. Steve even handed a couple customers a pair of scissors, inviting them to cut some kale from his garden. Oh. Time to offload. Yeah? I mean, I'll eat some. You eat kale? Yeah. Put it in smoothies is really good. Great. Or you can... There's research that suggests we get a mental health boost from these kinds of interactions. Relationships like baristas, exercise instructors, or familiar faces on the commute. The kinds of light, friendly interactions I watched over a dozen times in the hour I spent in Steve's garage. I'm 73. I was about like... 73? I'm 70. I was about like 37 years. Oh my gosh. I just wore the slippers. I was reached out to you about getting some shoes signed for my wedding. I remember that. Yes. Congratulations by the way. Thank you. They're just these... which is a pop thumb. Oh, those are pretty. More tips on clothing repair coming up on Outside In after the break. When do you need them? By the end of the weekend. It'd be great. I'll get you a friday watch. Sure. 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Don't skip this. This is not an ad. This is me, Nate. And I'm here to tell you that it is yet again time to open up the outside inbox to listener questions. We have been getting the most random submissions lately. Like can bobcats get hairballs? Or why does warm dirt smell so good? But we need more questions. So please send us the weirdest, wackiest questions about science and the natural world that you can think of. It is super easy. You can call our hotline at 1-844-GO-AUTER. Or even better, send us a voice memo to outsideinradio.nhbr.org. Okay, back to the show. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Justine Paridee. Today we've been sharing tips to help us cultivate the practice of repairing our clothes, keeping them in our closets and out of the landfill. But to do that, there is something we have to contend with. Clothes are sometimes too cheap. I sometimes get negative comments. Like if I'm repairing a sock, I'll hear somebody say, oh, why bother? Just buying a new pair. Like, you know, if you could buy a new pair of socks for like under $5, would you spend an hour fixing your sock? That's Arona Kunaraj, a textile artist in Toronto, Canada. I imagine a lot of us relate to that sentiment. Like this thing is so cheap, it's not even worth fixing. I'll just buy another. But cheap clothes are a major contributor to why the garment industry has such a huge carbon footprint. There's data from 2014 that shows the average person in North America buys 35 pounds of clothing every year, which translates to 64 t-shirts or 16 pairs of jeans. Another study in the UK indicated that most purchases are worn just seven times total. Some of that is manufactured by trends. This idea of constantly changing your clothing per season and things like that. But some of it is because cheap clothes simply aren't built to last. Some fall apart after just one wash, which is why spending more on higher quality stuff can save you money in the long run. It's going to have a longer shelf life. It's not this thing of, you know, kind of throwing it away and wasting it. So here's tip number five. When it is time to buy something new, consider investing in clothes that can actually be fixed. Perhaps buying from companies that will fix them for you. I went to university for costume design, which is how I spend about half of my time now. So I probably spend about half of it costuming into theater and opera world and half of it in fashion, production and repair. This again is Dante Gonzalez. Dante works as a repair specialist for Toast, the UK based brand with branches in New York, and whose sweaters I covet. Probably the most common repair that any person will get in, Toast or not, is a pants crutch. It is the truth. It gets the most wear and tear. Dante offers weekly drop-in sessions at the shop, where customers can swing by and be guided through a mend, or drop something off to be fixed. I did fix the cuffs on a coat once. It was a navy coat and I did a light blue darn around the cuffs, on the rim of the cuffs and on the pockets as well. That came out really beautifully. But it's not just brands on the more boutique end. The outdoor gear industry has actually really led the way here, especially Patagonia. Lots of brands have repair departments, or sometimes secondhand resale platforms. They include Eileen Fisher, H&M, Levi's, LL Bean, Arcterix. Nordstrom claims to be the largest employer of tailors in North America. Even the global retail giant Uniclo has a repair department now, at least for some products. And why are the brands, you know, moving in this space? When I spoke with Sonali Diddy, a researcher on sustainability in the fashion industry at Colorado State University, she said, policy is making them move in this space. In other words, these brand repair departments are not necessarily coming from the goodness of their corporate hearts. New EU regulations went into effect in fall 2025, which will eventually require textile producers to share more data with the public, and to pay for textile waste, collecting, sorting, and recycling. A similar law also passed in California in 2024. So I think that seems to be one of the major drivers for brands saying, oh, maybe we need to invest in the repair ecosystem. Point is, making repair a priority isn't just a personal choice. It's also a matter of policy. Tip number six, turn repair into an art project. Repair doesn't have to be invisible. Sometimes the mend itself can be beautiful. Every time I post, like, a workshop with visible mending, it sells out way quicker than any other workshop. There's definitely an interest in it. That's textile artist Aron O'Kunaraj again. Aron wrote a book a few years ago on something called visible mending. The book visible mending was sort of a rebellion against the things that I kind of grew up with. Aron's family immigrated to Canada from Laos after the Vietnam War, and her mother worked as a seamstress. So my mother would make our clothes, and she would also mend our clothes as well. And there was a real stigma with being poor. And so whenever I'd get a hole in my clothing, my mother would kind of painstakingly mend it invisibly. So that you couldn't tell that something has been mended. And when I started having my own children, and I was mending my husband's jeans and other things that he had, I felt like, you know, I wanted it to be visible. Instead of hiding the repair, visible mending is about highlighting it. Like using colorful stitches that really show up against the fabric, elaborate embroidery over a stain, or quilting fun patches over holes. There's also a style of Japanese embroidery called Sashiko, traditionally used on fisherman's jackets, and that a lot of people use to mend their denim now. I wanted to be a celebration of the hole. I didn't want it to be like this thing that I was trying to hide. I always felt like the holes themselves were kind of a vestige of that person, how they used it, how they wore it. It was almost kind of like a remnant of that person in some way. Tip number seven, embrace the repair mindset. Repair isn't passive. It does ask us for our resources, like our time, attention, sometimes our money. But that doesn't have to be the way that we think about it. I guess another thing I would say is like, it's not that hard. Like everyone's always like, how do you have time to like hand wash all your sweaters? I'm like, it takes 10 minutes. That's fashion writer Amelia Petrarcha again. At first, a new chore might feel insurmountable, but once you do it once or twice and you have your tools ready, in this case, a bucket and some wool detergent, you can do it. I just sort of take a deep breath and tell myself like, if I can just spend 15 minutes doing this before I go to bed tonight, like I will thank myself for the rest of the season because it's not, number one, it's not that hard. And number two, your clothes are not as dirty as you think. Like you don't need to be washing your stuff all the time, especially not sweaters. Like if you just wash them once or twice a season, like you're good. And so yeah, I guess my my my says suck it up. And just bite the bullet because it's not that hard and you'll feel really good about it when you do it. Another thing is mending feels good. A lot of people are very aware of overconsumption and there's a real hunger for an alternative. My repair skill of choice these days is darning. When I finish darning a hole in a sweater, I admit I get a little eco boost. I show it off, posting before and after photos on Instagram. And I'll be honest, I love the compliments. Darning is also this lovely balance of relaxing and stimulating. Most of the time I do it while chilling out and watching comfort TV, yet each repair is a little puzzle, almost always at the perfect level of difficulty. Like I have the basic skills, but because it's a little different each time, it stretches me. And I find that every time I put my time and attention on a piece of clothing, I'm deepening my relationship with it. Maybe that sounds over the top, but clothes can be emotional. Like think about it, the scarf a friend knitted for you, your mother's dress, the t-shirt you got on a trip, those jeans you wore on that first date. But because the world is just tough on clothes, it's likely that we'll end up mending our favorite stuff over and over again. And this is where the repair mindset really deepens. My dad, who is an engineer, told me about this sort of principle of engineering where once you fix something, the next week is link is going to go. And it's probably going to go fairly quickly. Don't take Gonzalez again. Well, I think it comes down to some of my fundamental values of being very, very stubborn and also very soft at the same time. If like I can fix it, I will fix it, it will break again. I will fix it again. I can do hurt things and I can do them gently and be kind to myself and others in the world while also being very persistent that the change can happen. It is a very optimistic mindset and not a nihilistic one, I would say. And this brings me to my last tip. Find community. What is your hand sewing familiarity? Basically zero. I love that. All right, let's do it. This is tape I recorded at Ripe for Repair, a monthly meetup where I live in Portland, Maine. It's a spin off of a repair cafe, which is kind of what it sounds like. People bring in their broken things and there are other people there to help fix stuff. In one corner of the room, there's a line of sewing machines, each operated by a volunteer. At this one, Rylina Alney is helping Eli Spencer with a hole in his pants. You use your jeans? Yeah. What was the issue? Big old hole in them. And I'm clueless and need an expert to fix them for me. So it's cool. I'm amazing that I've become the expert here. I find that kind of hilarious. It's not just clothes being repaired here. Another sewing machine is being operated by a volunteer whose day job is timber framing. And that afternoon, she repaired a stool used for blueberry picking, which is just about the most main thing I have ever heard. That's what I did. I fixed that stool that I sat on in a bunch. I was like, this is going to work for some hard, for some like hard blueberry picking. There's also a bike repair station and an electronic zone. Burnt resistor. Where guides with headlamps are examining a busted Roku. Like, I think it's going to turn out to be something like 0.77 ohms. Does anybody here want like coffee or seltzer or snacks? Ali Mann is the organizer here. She's spending the afternoon buzzing around the room, greeting newcomers and asking folks if they need anything. I think there are some like very basic, like fundamental reasons why this feels like a good idea. Creating a space for people to be with each other, keep each other company, help each other out in like a low stakes way that really has the potential to bring in people across lines of difference, you know, across race, cross class, intergenerational thing because everybody has stuff. Once upon a time, people may have learned skills like this in home economics or shop class, but both teachers and enrollment in this kind of education have sharply declined. And a lot of people don't feel empowered to fix their things, or it doesn't occur to them to do so in the first place. I don't know, I think we're trying to sort of create a space where people can practice these values of using the skills that you have to benefit your community and receiving help from other people and like working those muscles and getting good at those things all outside the market. So nobody's paying for anything, this is not about money, this is about like enjoying each other and enjoying each other's skills and supporting each other. Everyone is here to repair stuff and keeping things out of the landfill on its own is worthwhile. But there's more going on than that. Maybe it sounds a little pap, but at the repair cafe, people are gathering in person, problem solving, often with strangers, to fix stuff in community, practicing this repair mindset. Things break, but we can fix them and we can fix them together. Not to put too fine a point on it, but what's being repaired here might be way more than stuff. All right, that is it for outside in and it's pretty challenging to adequately describe some of these repairs, but it's really worth seeing how they look because some of them are absolutely gorgeous. We've shared some photos on our website and on social media, we're at outside in radio on all the places. Also, check out the show notes, we'll be sharing links on how to find a repair cafe near you or how to start your own and places to learn mending skills. This episode was produced, reported and mixed by Justine Paradis and edited by our executive producer Taylor Quimby. I am your host, Nate Hedgie, our team also includes Marina Hanky, Felix Poon and Jessica Hunt. NHPR's director of on-demand audio is Rebecca Levoie. Music of this episode came from BOMOL, Rebecca Mardal, Cody High and Blue Dot Sessions. Outside in is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio. Come on in, Hunt. Hey, Steve. 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