Extending the life of garments has a huge environmental impact, saving resources and reducing garment and textile waste but it can also help us express our deep relationship to our clothes.

Jessica Jay is an exponent of visible mending and creative garment repair from the Reparation Studio, and she joined the assembly to teach the basics of hand-stitching and demonstrate some skills and techniques that can be used to patch repair garments.

Jess also led a team of students from Whitecliffe and together they taught how to extend the life of clothing by making simple repairs such as restitching hems and seams, sewing on buttons and fixing zips or repairing and embellishing holes and other signs of wear.

In a fashion industry consumed by newness, Jess and her work invites you to celebrate your relationship with a well-worn piece of clothing. Through her work at Reparation Studio, she hosts visible mending workshops, creates artworks, and has compiled kits and a zine to spread her work's ethos of using every available resource to extend the life of textiles in our lives, and keep them from landfill. 

Some beautiful examples of hand-worked visible mends by Jessica Jay at Reparation Studio.

To find out more about Jessica Jay's work, head to www.reparationstudio.com or @re_______studio on Instagram.

Cover image: Detail of one of Jess' artworks, scrap sketch 01. 

Fashioning Assembly Aotearoa was supported by the City Centre targeted rate. 

Global Fashioning Assembly 2022 was supported by the Creative Industries fund NL. 

web: www.globalfashioningassembly.com

insta: @globalfashioningassembly