The new is non well forgotten old — the comparative analysis of mending practices in Western and post-Soviet contexts.

The new is non well forgotten old — the comparative analysis of mending practices in Western and post-Soviet contexts. This article describes the increased interest in mending practices and indicates that the research on mending is rather limited and mainly conducted in the Western world. Assuming that the answers regarding how to rediscover and redistribute mending knowledge are concealed in a mundane repair culture of the post-socialist world, the author proposes to acknowledge the post-socialist Ukrainian melange of everyday repair practices for their meaning of resilience, diversity and unintended but real sustainability.
The theoretical foundation underpinning this PhD study is the theory of consumption temporalities. And through the wardrobe interviews conducted with the participants of the design research project, this study describes why people engage with mending and how these practices are linked to the growing trend of second-hand consumption. Moreover, the narratives of the co-explorers of the project illustrate the different interpretations of the mending aesthetic codes by people approaching mending and those who practice clothing repair regularly. Finally, repair infrastructures in the Danish and Ukrainian contexts are compared, accentuating the two-level repair infrastructure in the Ukrainian context. It facilitates the development of mending competencies through school education and the network of competent and affordable seamstress services.