Lily Fulop, @mindful_mending

Tackling the issues of toxic landfills, irreversible effects of climate change, and corporate corruption may seem too much for even the most conscious of consumers to tackle.

To alleviate some of my own eco-anxieties, I sat down with Lily Fulop, founder of @mindful_mending on instagram and author of Wear, Repair, and Repurpose: A Maker’s Guide to Mending and Upcycling, to discover ways consumers can fight against corporate corruption and environmental pollution. 

With garments retailing for less than the price of sandwiches, it seems almost impossible to resist colorful closet additions. The global retail, jewelry, and footwear market combined makes around $2 trillion annually, more than the total goods and services provided by the 126 poorest countries in the world. In Wear, Repair, and Repurpose, Lily details how cheap clothing has enabled the rise of wasteful consumerism: “We keep buying more and more new clothes, which are made cheaper and cheaper. There’s nowhere for those clothes to go — their lifecycle is painfully short, and after a few uses, they’re done.” 

Even through Zoom, her message rang clear: our seemingly innocuous trips to the mall come at a great cost. Excessive consuming means excessive disposal. An average American throws out around 81 pounds of clothes per year. If you think about that on a larger scale, that means around 26 billion pounds of clothes end up in landfills each year, just from the United States. 

If you think donating your clothes to a local thrift shop solves the problem, I have some bad news. Only a small percentage of clothing is bought from secondhand shops, while  the rest are shipped to developing countries or buried in a landfill. “It’s a big misconception that clothes you send to thrift stores end up being worn by needy people, and it’s problematic to think of our clothes as donations instead of waste,” Lily writes. 

To help consumers better understand  she draws a parallel to recycling one-use plastics, like water bottles. “Recycling is great,” Lily argues “but it doesn’t stop the amount of resources that went into making and shipping the plastic the first time around.” In the same way, donating clothes does not influence or offset how resource intensive and pollutive textile manufacturing is. The fashion industry and its waste pathways are unsustainable and in need of serious structural change.

So how can we as individuals help tackle the issue? Lily understands how scary and hopeless this all may seem, which is why she offers mending as an easy way for consumers to get involved in creating a sustainable fashion future. 

Her book, Wear, Repair, and Repurpose, provides tutorials on mending and patchwork, all the while centering readers in environmental activism. Lily aspires to “connect people to their clothes, to value them more” and hopes that once “larger consumer shifts happen through these small shifts and activism, brands will start to catch on.”

Wear, Repair, and Repurpose guides readers through t-shirt scraps and holey sweaters through mending tutorials. (Source: Lily Fulop)

You might associate mending with bygone days of Grandma patching up her old undies or maybe with earth-loving hippies who only drink kombucha. Lily, however, puts a hip spin on this useful technique of keeping your clothes out of the landfill and in your closet!

Lily first encountered mending at  college when she interned at Kelly Lane Design, an independent, one-woman owned fashion brand. Her first-hand experience with textile waste in manufacturing inspired her creative solutions to save garments from the landfill. She transformed fabric scraps that were once destined for the landfill into pom-poms, tassels, and bags. 

Fabric scraps sold at Fab Scrap that would have otherwise been discarded (source: Lily Fulop)

Her instagram, @mindful_mending, began as a project for her senior capstone course at Carnegie Mellon School of Design. As a Mindful Mending follower myself, I wondered why she chose instagram as her main social media platform. Lily said instagram has allowed her to reach “younger audiences that hadn’t been introduced to mending and make it appealing and cool.” With over thirty-three thousand followers now, Lily has created a movement that urges consumers to re-evaluate their fashion consumption habits through creative solutions, specifically mending. 

For many people, mending is fixing a small hole in jeans or patching up old socks. For Lily, mending is an altered relationship between us and our clothes. By forming new relationships to our clothes, we begin to value the labor that goes into garment making, all while adding our own flare. She posts tutorials on how to make alterations stylish and personalized. She told me she hopes to motivate consumers to “be more thoughtful with their purchases, and buy things that people will use for a long time.” As we begin to value our clothes more, we can buy less and waste less.

Mending is a tool used not only to fix holes, but also to personalize your clothes! (source: Lily Fulop)

Published earlier this year, Lily’s book, Wear, Repair, and Repurpose, includes mending tips for people with all different skill sets, but is especially welcoming to those who don’t have any experience. She told me, “I want things to be accessible for beginners so the barrier to start is smaller.” Sewing and fixing our own clothes can be intimidating, especially for younger generations who grew up with fast fashion, like me! Lily celebrates “all skill levels, saying ‘it’s okay to make mistakes,’ and sharing tutorials’” whether it be in her book or on Instagram. Her tutorials taught me how easy it was to darn my socks so I wouldn’t have to toss them every time my toes began to peek through. And now I have unique socks with colorful patches to show off!

Socks that have been darned with colorful thread. (Source: Lily Fulop)

As someone often tempted by cheap price tags, I asked Lily how to be a more conscientious shopper. She advised being “more thoughtful with [our] purchases and buy[ing] things that we would use for a long time.” Oftentimes we are turned off by a big price tag, but if we have the means, we must  view clothes as an investment. 

Rather than tossing your stained shirts, maybe you’ll turn to @mindful_mending for a creative fix to reduce further consumption and keep your clothes out of the landfill!