If Alice Brown is browsing in second-hand shops and finds a jumper with a hole, that won't stop her buying it. "I see it as challenge," says the 27-year-old forest ranger from Lincolnshire. She is a champion of the growing fashion for eye-catching repairs.
Over the last year she has developed her own unique style, needle-felting cute animals and insects to cover moth holes, stains and other imperfections, winning her a huge following online. "The natural place for decoration is in the centre at the front. If the hole is under the arm or on the shoulder, it forces you to think about the design," she says.
Often dubbed "visible mending" the trend is spreading from hobby crafters and community workshops, even drawing in fast-fashion brands and reaching the designer catwalks this year. At one Saturday morning workshop in Brighton, Jayne Eagle shows her students how to attach a patch of fabric behind a tear so the cat-face design peeps through. Then she instructs them in stitching techniques inspired by the traditional Japanese methods Boro and Sashiko.
Instead of matching the thread colour to the garment, they make the mend highly decorative using geometric patterns in large white stitching. She also offers classes in darning using contrasting vibrant colours that celebrate, rather than disguise, the repair. One student, Nicola, has already used her newfound skills to stitch over sunscreen marks on a T-shirt "making a feature of it" and is now delighted that people "stop seeing the stains and just see the decoration".
Another student, Lisa, says her mother's generation would never have wanted the mends to show. "Now part of it is being proud of what you've done," she says. Lisa bought a second-hand jacket online, but snipped the fabric with the scissors when she was opening the package.
She managed to patch it in a way that "looks intentional". "I was actually pointing it out to people," she laughs. In the past mending was primarily about saving money, by wearing clothes for longer, rather than buying new.
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