Care and Production of Clothing in Norwegian Homes: Environmental Implications of Mending and Making Practices
Journal article, Peer reviewed
Published version
Date
2018-08Metadata
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Original version
Laitala K, Klepp IG. Care and Production of Clothing in Norwegian Homes: Environmental Implications of Mending and Making Practices. Sustainability. 2018;10(8) http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su10082899Abstract
Mending, re-design, and altering are alternatives for prolonging the use period of clothing. It is a common assumption that nobody mends clothing anymore in Western societies. This paper studies Norwegian consumers’ clothing mending and making practices. We ask how common the different mending and making activities are, has this changed during the past several years, who are the clothing menders and makers, and further, are these practices related to consumers’ environmental opinions? We build on three quantitative surveys in Norway from 2010, 2011, and 2017. Many consumers do mend their clothing at least occasionally, especially the simpler tasks, such as sewing on a button and fixing an unravelled seam. Women and the elderly are more active in making and mending, whereas the young are bit more likely to make something new out of old clothing. The mending activities were correlated with respondents’ environmental opinions. Mending clothes is more common than is usually assumed. Knowledge of current practices and barriers for clothing mending enables us to recommend measures that can potentially increase the use time of clothing. These results can be beneficial in clothing design, home economics, and crafts education as well as understanding consumer behavior and making policies that aim at environmental improvements within clothing consumption.
Publisher
MDPISeries
Sustainability;Volume 10, Issue 8Journal
Sustainability
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2018 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).