Mend It, Wear It, Stop Buying It

It was announced in a group chat and expected to draw two people. Six came, one of them from forty minutes away, all of them holding a bag.

The bags contained: three pairs of jeans worn through at the inner thigh, which is the most common failure and the most fixable; a cashmere sweater with four moth holes; two shirts with collar fray; a coat with a torn pocket bag; and one wool skirt that had been eaten along the hem so thoroughly it became the day's group project.

None of them had mended anything before. All of them expected it to be hard. It is not hard. It is slow, and we have confused those two things so completely that a generation has thrown away clothing that needed nine minutes of attention.

The jeans took the longest and taught the most, because the repair has to be visible and everybody hated that at first. You cannot invisibly fix a hole in denim at the thigh; you can only make the fix deliberate. By the third patch nobody minded. By the fourth two people were choosing contrast thread on purpose.

The woman who drove forty minutes brought her father's coat. The pocket bag had gone in about 1994. We replaced it with cotton from a pillowcase, which is what it would have been replaced with in 1994, and she wore it out of the house in August because she wanted to have it on.

Next Sunday, same table, and somebody is bringing a machine.

The blocks lose their oils in about twelve months and become, functionally, decorative wood. Sanding restores them briefly. Nobody sands them.

What works, in order: freezing an affected garment for seventy-two hours, which kills every life stage; washing or dry cleaning everything before it goes away for a season, because moths are eating the body oils and not the wool; and sealed containers rather than garment bags with a gap at the bottom.

That second one is the one people skip and it is the one that matters most. A clean jumper is close to inedible. A jumper worn twice and put away carries sweat, skin and whatever was on your hands, and that is the actual meal — the wool is just what the meal is served on. This is why the damage clusters at underarms, cuffs and collars rather than randomly across a garment, and why the piece you wore most is always the piece that gets eaten.

The freezer method has a detail nobody mentions: seal the garment in a bag first, and let it come back to room temperature still sealed before you open it, or condensation forms on cold wool. Seventy-two hours is the figure to use. Twenty-four kills adults and larvae and reliably misses eggs.

If you find damage, deal with the room and not just the jumper. Vacuum the back of the wardrobe, the skirting behind it, and any carpet underneath, then empty the vacuum outside. Larvae leave the garment to pupate and they do it in the dark seam where the carpet meets the wall.

The moths you see flying are males and are not eating anything. The damage is done by larvae you will never see, in the dark, in the folds, over months.

Sixty-five dollars, ten days, and a man named Emil who looked at them, turned them over once, and said “these are fine, why do people throw these away.”

There are four cobblers left in the county. There were thirty in 1980. Use one.