First Series | Ten Questions About Cloth
Part 9 | When Did Clothes Stop Being Things We Repaired and Become Things We Replaced?
For a long time, cloth and clothing were not things that could always be replaced easily. Worn areas were repaired, clothes were handed down, and old materials were reused. But as the production of textiles and ready-made clothing increased, clothes gradually became easier to obtain. A major change can be seen from the late 1950s through the 1960s, when ready-made clothing production in Japan expanded and synthetic fibers and mass-produced garments entered everyday life. Buying a finished garment became a much more ordinary choice than before.
But that did not mean people immediately stopped mending. A 1972 study of households in Hiroshima, Tokyo, and Iwate found that although making clothes at home had declined, mending was still frequently practiced. The study does not represent every household in Japan, but it shows something important: buying clothes and repairing them could still exist together in everyday life.
Buying Clothes, but Still Repairing Them
I remember this from my own childhood in the later Shōwa period. At elementary school, I learned how to use a sewing machine and how to sew on buttons. Many of my clothes were hand-me-downs from relatives, and if something could be repaired, we repaired it. This is only my own memory, not evidence for Japan as a whole, but for me, mending was still a very ordinary part of life.
From here, this is canoha’s view. I do not think people suddenly stopped valuing their clothes. Rather, as fabric and clothing became easier to produce and easier to buy, replacing something also became easier. For a while, “buying” and “repairing” remained side by side. But as clothing became increasingly accessible, the need to repair and continue wearing the same garment gradually became less important in everyday life.
Today, when a shirt tears or a garment wears out, buying a replacement can often feel simpler than repairing it. The important change, I think, is not that people suddenly stopped caring about their clothes. It is that we moved from a life in which repairing was often necessary to one in which we can choose whether to repair or replace.
And that is where the next question begins. We no longer have to mend every piece of clothing because cloth is difficult to obtain. Yet some people are choosing to mend again.
If we no longer have to repair our clothes, why are we choosing to do it again?