Repair Matters
In Repair Matters, waste is transformed into fashion. In The Netherlands, around 145 million kilos of clothing end up in the landfill every year. This is the equivalent of 24 discarded garments per person. Repair Matters shows a collection of clothes made entirely of obsolete and broken garments. In this way, Minnaard is making a start on the realisation of Noeskwam, a world in which waste is embraced. Noeskwam, a garbage patch floating in the sea, is an imaginary society created by textile designer Alicia Minnaard (1997). The inhabitants of the island of waste regard the waste that washes ashore as a precious material. After all, plastic and textiles last forever and are suitable for recycling.
In addition to designing a fully recycled clothing collection, Minnaard is also committed to the normalisation of clothing repair in other ways. On the online platform Fixing Fashion, and in the museum, she encourages others to make discarded clothing wearable again. In video tutorials and a booklet for everyone to take home, she offers users free tools to care for, repair and upgrade their clothes. In this way, she lets people know: clothing has no end point, but is always the starting point of another cycle. “We have everything around us that we need, we just need to use it,” Minnaard says.
