THE RIGHT TO REPAIR
MENDING IS NOT A DOWNGRADE
I keep coming back to the same four words: recycle, rent, resell, repair. Everyone loves the first three because they still let the industry sell you something new. Repair is the odd one out. It just asks you to keep wearing what you already own. This shouldn’t be radical, but somehow it is.
A 2025 study from the UK's WRAP found that when someone gets an item repaired, it replaces a new purchase over 80% of the time. That's not a nice environmental footnote, that's a business threat to anyone whose model depends on you buying more. No wonder brands have taken their time warming up to it.
But that is changing. Patagonia has quietly built a 100-person repair operation and nearly tripled the number of garments it fixes each year since the early 2020s. Levi's has had Tailor Shops since 2010. Selfridges, Toast, Marks & Spencer - all engaging with repair in some capacity. Some charge for it, some absorb the costs.
However, I'm more interested in what's happening at the smaller scale, like us: repair cafés, sewing circles, neighbourhood ateliers. Montreal has seen a rise in community-driven repair programs: Growing ARC, Brique par Brique, and Espace Fabrik to name a few. The people showing up aren't fast-fashion casualties looking for a free fix; they're the ones who already chose well and just need help keeping that choice alive. That's the same energy that walks through our doors. It's not about saving money, though it does. It's about learning to look at a torn seam and see a Tuesday evening instead of a trash bag.
There's also something almost embarrassingly obvious in all this: repairing clothes isn't a new idea we invented, it's an old habit fashion talked us out of. Communities that never had the luxury of disposability, across the global majority, and plenty of working-class communities everywhere else, have been doing real circularity this whole time, without a sustainability department or a press release.
So here's my pitch, the raison d’être of this shop, as a matter of fact: bring us the thing you actually love, the one with the hole in the elbow you've been ignoring for eight months. Let's put it back together. Question everything, including the idea that broken means done.
Sources & further reading:
WRAP, Displacement Rates Untangled — the 82.2% repair displacement figure
Open Repair Alliance, The Rise of Community Repair (2024) — global repair-group and repair-count data
Further reading: Lauren Cochrane, The Right to Repair Your Wardrobe, Atmos
