On Not Fixing Things: Ambivalence and Reparation in the Fashion Industry

The current resurgence of mending cultures reflects multiple cultural shifts: growing awareness of sustainable fashion practices, responses to global instability, and protests against hegemonic systems that prioritise the new and unscathed. Yet, for many of us, repair is complicated, with multiple factors making it difficult to achieve – we live in a world where the transformative or anticipatory potential of acquisition is highly prized, and imperfection is often interpreted as a flaw. The fashion industry, in particular, has a complicated and inconsistent relationship with repair; simultaneously increasingly vocal in its support of repair practices yet unable or unwilling to make the structural changes that would facilitate a true ‘right to repair’. Thus, despite the increasing awareness and visibility of repair cultures and fashion narratives, consumers and the industry are often ambivalent about repair. Bringing together Klein’s writing on reparation, ambivalence, and guilt with current work on repair, imperfection, and shame in fashion, this paper explores how theories of ambivalence can help us understand fashion’s complex relationship to repair. Asking how attending to the multiple forms of ambivalence manifest in relationships to clothing and repair might help us unpack the complexity of repair for an industry built upon fantasy and desire.