Mending Fashion

Mending has been an intrinsic aspect of dress culture for millennia but is largely overlooked in material and academic records. In this course we will adopt a multimodal approach to evolve together a robust definition of this ancient practice, current trend, and nascent scholarly discipline, viewing fashion not from the entrenched perspective of productionconsumption, but as owner, wearer, and caretaker. Approached through close looking, broad reading, and object analysis, we will reconstruct mending as a developing technology from the adoption of body coverings through the evolution and metastasization of fashion, while considering its utility and metaphorical valence when applied to industrial systems. Crucially, like scientists who “do science,” we will also recruit our hands and do mending—no experience required. Dress is the focus of this course, but students may explore directions including new materialisms, secondhand trade circulation and waste colonialism, feminist archaeology, conservation and survival bias, discard studies and rubbish theory, among others, since mending studies affords multiple points of entry, from the phenomenological to the metaphysical. Readings reflect this hybridity, and students are encouraged to engage creatively with the material according to their own research interests. This is an opportunity to turn fashion inside out, to explore its hidden haptic, sensuous, olfactory, textural aspects, and to compile, intervene in, and think with a relatively untouched material archive. Students are evaluated on in-class presentations and contributions, an annotated mending practicum (skill level immaterial), and a final case study research paper. 3 credits.