Patching the Machine
Image courtesy of Refashion.
I’d had a plan for this review about the French government’s €154m clothing repair scheme.
‘France to offer cold hard cash to repair clothes instead of binning them’ ran the headline of a Dazed article from 2nd August 2023. I remember reading it at the time. Cold hard cash. It seemed unlikely, and Dazed isn’t exactly the strongest pillar of journalistic accuracy, but there was a Guardian article from back then too, with the subheading claiming that “people will be able to claim back €6-€25 of cost of repairing clothes and shoes in latest environmental measure.”
OK, so probably not cold hard cash, but a bureaucratic process presumably requiring submission of receipts on some online government portal with an obscure login procedure. That sounds more realistic; more French. The €6 that it cost to have those trousers taken up would appear in my bank account at some point in the following three months, and the permafrost would stop melting.
After reading about the scheme, I’d totally forgotten about it. I work as a fashion designer in Paris. My job is clothing, in France, but I’d heard nothing more about this major French €154m scheme about clothing. Then I was asked to write about it and, so, my plan.
It was going to be simple. After the traditional period of luxuriant procrastination, I would knuckle down and take a garment to one of my local retoucheries to see how it all worked. I don’t think I own a garment that really needs repairing, however, so I would have to damage one first. Would I unpick a seam, making it look like an accident? Maybe rip the corner of a pocket like I’d been in an exciting fight and see what they could do to patch it up? Or perhaps I would make it easy for them and just pull off a button.
Summoning the spirit of David Sedaris, I would write with warmth about my clumsy interactions with the tailor or seamstress in their tiny shop, cluttered with piles of unhemmed curtains and wonky rails of coats awaiting treatment. Maybe there would be a forgotten cactus or ailing spider plant in the window. I would mention that too, and maybe the sickly fluorescent lights, to give a sense of the place and pad out the word count. Then I would write with humorous exasperation about the refund process: how it wasn’t worth the time it took to process it, or that I couldn’t get it to work in the first place. But, actually, how does it work?
Alongside those write-ups in Dazed and The Guardian, the scheme was reported on by other major outlets, but despite the €6-€25 figure repeated across all the articles, the details still seemed vague. The “cold, hard cash” claim was almost definitely click-bait, but Dazed went on to say that France will “pay all citizens a ‘repair bonus’ for taking their clothes in to get fixed.” CNN Business claimed, in ‘France will pay you to repair your clothes’, that “a simple piece of restitching will receive a €6 subsidy, while resoling a pair of shows will qualify for a €25 rebate.” It didn’t make sense, and I’m not talking about the basic typographical error. A €6 subsidy but a €25 rebate?
A Le Monde article from 12th July says that “under the scheme, customers will be able to claim €7 for mending a heel and €10-€25 for clothing repairs from a €154 million fund set up to cover 2023-2028.” Right, so I will have to claim the money myself then? It went on to quote Bérangère Couillard, the then Secretary of State for Ecology, as she announced the initiative in Paris. “The goal is to support those who do the repairs,” Couillard said, referring to sewing workshops, but also those brands that offer repair services. Hang on, how does giving me money support the people actually doing the repairs?
The government had delegated the nitty gritty to a fashion and textile environmental nonprofit... thing... called Refashion. I went to its website, where there was absolutely no mention of the scheme. After clicking around for a while, I found a tiny link to Refashion Pro. There was no mention of it on there either, but three more links and a slight graphic design change later, I think I know what this is, or what it will be. It’s called Le Bonus Réparation, and it’s a discount, not a bonus.
As a member of the public, to have a hole in a tailored jacket seam restitched might cost me €12. Under the Bonus Réparation scheme, that kind of repair gets me a discount of €8. There is a table to explain the set discounts for various repairs hidden amidst all those links on the Refashion site, so a complicated lining repair can be discounted by €25, or a simple operation to replace the tip of a stiletto heel is discounted by €7. But in the small print it specifies that the repair bonuses can’t exceed 60 per cent of the total repair fee, meaning that that little €12 seam repair can only be reduced by €7.20.
I don’t know why all repairs can’t just be discounted by 60 per cent, but anyway, I would pay €4.80, and the tailor gets the additional €7.20 they are due... how? I went to the FAQs and a bland, confusing labyrinth of modern French bureaucracy opened up before me. There was another graphic design change. A stock photo header of some rippling fabric. Four subsections, nineteen question links. Declaration and reimbursement of the Repair Bonus. They have to declare the repair and then be reimbursed. Again, how? Repair Bonus Declaration Application. Click on that and, oh, another six question links. How do I access the reimbursement application? There’s an application? I click on that and: “The Repair Bonus declaration and reimbursement platform is not yet available...”
Repair work in a French retoucherie (image courtesy of Refashion).
According to the timeline set by Refashion, the scheme was meant to be up and running in October. I’m writing this on October 29th, it’s still not functioning, and no tailor or cobbler I could find had signed up for the scheme. When it does exist, an effective declaration will require, amongst other things, detailed explanations of the repairs required, a photograph of the garment before repair, a photograph of the garment after repair, and a photograph of the invoice detailing the repair, all uploaded using the app. Then, assuming the tailor or seamstress is digitally literate enough to manage all that, they should get reimbursed at the end of each month. Oh, and apparently an advance isn’t possible, so all the discounts must first come from their own pocket.
Why would anyone bother signing up to this? Refashion suggests to a prospective signee that “You create traffic in your store, you increase your turnover, you develop and retain your customer base, you become more well-known, you increase the value of your expertise,” which is all either totally speculative or uselessly abstract.
Most of the articles about the initiative cite that over 700,000 tonnes of clothing are disposed of every year in France. Anything to reduce that number and lighten the impact of the clothing industry is obviously laudable, and there certainly aren’t any fashion sustainability policies in the UK, or many other countries for that matter. Whether it actually works, however, remains to be seen, and by “work” I mean on a basic level of functionality, not whether it has any meaningful environmental effect. I’m staggered by the effort it must have taken to think up and codify that complicated system of applications and reimbursements; the time spent writing those endless FAQs; all those meetings discussing how it might work, what it would be called, and how the logo should look. I don’t think that Bonus Réparation is pure greenwashing, I just don’t think that it is nearly good enough.
Maybe by the time this review is published the online application will be fully functional,[1] thousands of people will be enticed by the lower repair prices and the reimbursements will be flowing smoothly. I genuinely hope it is a success. At the moment, I can’t help but think it was just something for a government minister to say in July 2023 as temperatures soared, wildfires sparked into infernos, and we were reminded once again how screwed we all are.
Even if we suppose that the scheme succeeds, the design of many items of contemporary clothing simply do not allow for easy repair, or the materials used in their construction are of such low-quality that repairs are almost a moot point. Think of the intricate stitching or technologically advanced finishings that you probably have on your gym gear, or the internally taped or ultrasonically welded seams of waterproof outerwear. Think too of the fabric quality needed to allow Shein to sell a winter coat for €26.99, home delivery included. Clothing like that is essentially disposable.
Of course, it is possible to repair the majority of our clothing, but even if we can fix it, do we really want to? Since the turn of the 18th century, when young dandies rejected the impractical flamboyance of their fathers and became enamoured instead with the rough woollen coats of their coachmen, Western fashion has often aestheticised elements of the dress of the working classes and the supposedly good, honest damage that it sustains. It still seems extremely difficult for us to find a social acceptance of that wear, damage and repair for our wider wardrobes, however, let alone the same aesthetic appreciation we seemingly only reserve for torn denim and worn-out chore jackets. Unlike workwear, we expect tailoring to be sharp and shirt collars crisp and fresh as a sign of respectability, but imagine the savings of time, energy, money and resources we could make if suits were machine washable and nothing needed to be ironed.
We also seem to be uncomfortable with clothing we’ve damaged ourselves and had repaired out of necessity. Witness the confused froth in July 2013 when then-Prince Charles was photographed wearing a light grey suit with an obvious patch near the front left hem, or back in 2009 when photographers zoomed in on the royal feet, picking up at least three patches on his well-worn Oxford shoes. Who knew it was acceptable to have your suit patched like that? Who knew it was even possible to have your shoes repaired like that? We were all entranced by the shambling aristocratic eccentricity of it, but also mildly scandalised that the future king went out to meet the public wearing a patched-up suit and knackered old shoes.
In a 2021 Country Life feature, Charles, again, was photographed in an extremely worn and oft-repaired, 20-year-old tweed hunting jacket that Liz Jones in the Daily Mail described as “a faded, shapeless garment sprouting loose threads that looks as if it belongs on a tramp, not on the heir to the throne.” We don’t have this problem with repaired furniture or appliances, vehicles, buildings, or any other pieces of design we own, use, wear down and damage. With clothing, we confuse thriftiness with miserliness, if not outright poverty.
Bonus Réparation might make more people repair their clothes, and, as such, might help make repaired clothing more socially acceptable, but doesn’t the environmental situation we’re in demand that we go further? If we really want to encourage people to repair their clothes, nationalise the retoucheries and make all repairs state-funded. Let’s go further still. France holds itself up as the global capital of fashion, so why not lead by example, shoulder some actual responsibility and piss off some billionaires?
We should impose a total Europe-wide ban on the worst online offenders such as Shein, Fashion Nova and Boohoo. While we’re at it, lets ban all virgin polyester, along with unnecessary mixed-fibre textiles that are near-impossible to recycle. We should restrict fast-fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M to eight product drops per year, instead of per month, and set minimum fabric and manufacturing quality standards across the industry.
Prices will be much higher, so raise basic wages to allow the general public to afford these nicer, longer-lasting clothes. People won’t shop as much, so how do we balance out the hit to the economy? Legalise drugs, maybe?
Humans seem to have been making aesthetic choices about the way they clothe their bodies since the practice began, but in his 1969 book The Concise History of Costume and Fashion historian James Laver suggests that the beginnings of fashion as we recognise it today emerged in the mid- 14th century.
Édouard Manet’s Young Lady in 1866, cited in a New York Times article about cultural progress (image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
The cycles were slow at first, but with the patenting of the first power loom in 1785, followed soon after by the mechanical sewing machine, the engine of fashion is now spinning at such a speed that Boohoo and its likes can go from an initial design sketch to shipping dirt-cheap, sweatshop-made garments to the consumer in under two weeks. Due to the easy availability of new, different clothing, we expect fashions to change rapidly, and so there needs to be new and different clothing to meet our expectations.
I don’t think damage is primarily why people discard clothing; changing tastes are. Even the most well-constructed, infinitely reparable Savile Row suit will fall victim to this. I would suggest banning fashion, but maybe we don’t need to.
On 10th October 2023, in ‘Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill’, The New York Times critic Jason Farago wrestled with a peculiarly deflating feeling of stasis that has been in my peripheral consciousness for a while now. Farago notes that in sharp contrast to Édouard Manet’s painting Young Lady in 1866, in which the subject’s dress anchors her firmly in that year and no other, he recently saw gallery goers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which the painting is held, dressed “in the skinny jeans that defined the 2000s and in the roomy, high-waisted jeans that were popular in the 1990s; neither style [looking] particularly au courant or dated”. He goes on to insist that “we are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.”
Farago argues that our obsessive fascination with newness and the value we place upon it is a hangover from modernism, in which the role of the creative radically shifted. During that period of never-to-be-repeated technological and social upheaval, it became imperative for the artist or designer to forge the next link in the creative chain, on and on into the future. Yet for the vast majority of human history, Farago explains, this was simply not the case: “there is no inherent reason – no reason; this point needs to be clear – that a recession of novelty has to mean a recession of cultural worth.”
Two days after Farago’s piece was published, Gary Wang, a former FTX executive, arrived at federal court in Manhattan to continue testifying in the criminal trial against his one-time colleague Sam Bankman-Fried, and I was fascinated by the suit he chose to wear.
The jacket was boxy with three buttons, and the sleeves reached halfway down his thumbs. He’d paired it with an old greyish blue shirt, and a printed silk tie of a red and beige cinema carpet geometric that they definitely don’t make anymore. The whole thing seemed enormous and oddly flamboyant, especially compared with the standard issue, two-button, slim-fit, 2023 tailoring of his legal team next to him. It’s the kind of outfit we haven’t seen out in public in decades; the kind of outfit you can only buy in a thrift store.
It might have been a classic tech nerd IDGAF look in the hoodie-and-flip-flop tradition, but Wang was perfectly dressed for a court appearance. He had already plead guilty in his own trial for fraud pertaining to FTX’s collapse, so the formerly 431st richest man in the world wasn’t trying to look poor, and he didn’t. Judging by other photos of him online, I also don’t think he’s got the nuanced sense of personal style needed to deliberately channel a late-season Frasier Crane so perfectly. His outfit was incorrectly correct. It was definitely not new and resolutely unmodern, but because of an apparent lack of intention, it didn’t look vintage, either.
I thought about reaching out to Wang or his representatives to ask about his outfit, but I’m not a proper journalist so I don’t really know how to do that. Also, he’s probably got a lot of heavy stuff to think about right now, what with all the wire fraud convictions. If you’re reading this Gary, you looked great.
Sure, it’s just a few pairs of mixed-era jeans in an art gallery and a boxy suit at a trial. Maybe it’s nothing, but maybe the fashion engine is slowing, little by little. Maybe we are beginning to sober up from the intoxicating idea of the new. Maybe the end of fashion is coming faster than we think, just like the end of the world.
[1] By mid-November 2023, the online application process seemed to be operational, although there was little evidence of levels of usage, ed.
Words Felix Chabluk Smith
Photographs Courtesy of Refashion and the Metropolitan Museum of Art
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #3. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.