Kate Sekules

https://visiblemending.com/

https://www.instagram.com/visiblemend/

Research

Monomaniacally mending. PhD on mending history and theory in progress. As Dr Mend I hold clothes saving surgeries. This VMDH is my project.

I have always mended, being of the generation with mothers who taught daughters to sew. I started the 'visible' part at least 20 years ago, but the more structured, or monomaniacal, approach could be dated to 2015, when I launched a dotcom version of this website, and started systematically creating methodologies for codesigning --which is what I call it now, since mending is trending too fast. I'm a lifelong fashion historian manqué, and started taking that further when my 25-year career in journI have always mended, being of the generation with mothers who taught daughters to sew. I started the 'visible' part at least 20 years ago, but the more structured approach could be dated to 2015, when I launched a dotcom version of this website, and started systematically creating methodologies for codesigning --which is what I call it now, since mending is trending too fast for comfort, and needs futureproofing. A lifelong fashion historian manqué, I went serious with it when my 25-year career in journalism was threatened by the great millennial magazine genocide. First, in 2010, I launched a website for curated personal closet trading (they didn't exist yet), in which you had to tell the story of every garment. It was called Refashioner, and still exists as a ghost—go visit! Just don't try to buy anything. alism fell under the threatened by magazines genocide

Kate Sekules has been a practitioner of visible mending, or codesign, for four decades. She is a doctoral candidate in Material Culture, history and theory of mending, at Bard Graduate Center, New York, with an M.A in Costume Studies from NYU. She is Assistant Professor of Fashion History at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and has taught the methodologies, contexts, and practice of textile repair at Parsons, FIT, Tufts, the Textile Society of America, the Association of Dress Historians, UK, RISD Museum, Winterthur Museum, and the Textile Arts Center, New York, among many others. Her book MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto was published by Penguin in fall 2020.

no

Yes

Brooklyn and London