Amanda Lee McCarty, sustainability consultant and host of the Clotheshorse podcast, remembers fixing a tear on her Forever 21 shirt with a stapler—just long enough to get through the workday before tossing it out.
In the early 2000s, when fast-fashion brands began flooding the market, clothing became so cheap that shoppers could endlessly refresh their wardrobes. The garments were poorly made and tore easily, but it hardly mattered. They were designed to be disposable, encouraging repeat purchases.
“It didn’t seem worth the time and effort to repair the top,” she recalls. “And besides, I didn’t have any mending skills at the time.”
McCarty isn’t alone. Starting in the early 1900s, schools trained students—mostly girls—in the art of sewing and mending clothes in home economics classes. Students learned how to operate sewing machines to create tidy hemlines and sew buttons by hand. But by the 1970s, partly due to the feminist critique that home economics classes reinforced traditional gender roles, these courses slowly began getting cut from public schools.
There are now several generations of Americans with no sewing skills at all. In a recent study conducted by Levi’s, 41% of Gen Zers report having no basic repair knowledge, such as fixing a tear or sewing on a button—which is double the rate of older generations.
This also coincided with clothes getting cheaper, thanks to a global supply chain and low-wage labor in developing countries. Suddenly, clothes were so inexpensive that even the poorest families could buy them instead of making them. Eventually, as McCarty illustrates, they were so cheap that there was no point in even mending them.
Today, the average American throws away 81.5 pounds of clothing every year, resulting in 2,100 pounds of textile waste entering U.S. landfills every second. This transformation of the fashion industry has led directly to the environmental disaster we now find ourselves in: Manufacturing billions of clothes annually accelerates climate change, and discarded clothes now clog up landfills, deserts, and oceans.
