When the Rana Plaza collapse occurred on 24 April 2013, I was working at the trainstation, selling coffee and snacks to mostly rushing travellers. I read in shock and sadness about the eight-story Rana Plaza commercial building collapsed due to a structural failure. The search for survivors lasted for 19 days and ended on 13 May 2013, with a confirmed death toll of 1,134.
In the months after the disaster, I saw people coming out of the trains with big bags full of cheap cloths. The first * Primark in the Netherlands just opened in Eindhoven, and the news of what happened to their clothing makers apparently didn’t stop anyone from shopping. I swore I would never shop at Primark, not even enter, or at any of the known Fast Fashion brands.
I was at that moment in time the most broke I ever was, but I mostly wore secondhand cloths. And still do. It wasn’t until 2016 I got my first custommade batik clothing. A luxury I saved for to buy and let make. Clothing pieces I still own and wear now.
Mended armpit in my favourite batikdress
But a piece of the same fabric behind it
The batik dress I wear the most, got damaged. And I repaired it to keep on wearing it. I usually save pieces of the batik my cloths are made from. I ask the tailor to keep the cut off. They are useful when repairs are needed as with my favorite dress.
I always mended cloths, at first mostly to alter them or make them fit better. As I started buying more cloths that were pre-loved, I noticed I don’t mind previous mends. They are actually a plus sometimes, knowing someone enjoyed the outfit before me.
Since mending is an act of resistance against Fast Fashion and a tool used in the Fashion Revolution as protest. I wanted to share this day my thoughts on mending with examples from the past. These mends bring the wearers closer to us and show how caring for what we wear has been part of our history, and is hopefully part of our future too.
Mended parts in batik TM-616-1
For the talk I gave at UvA I showed how mends can actually help us with provenance research. The mends tell us the clothing piece was worn and not just collected. An important distinction to make when dealing with objects collected in an colonial setting.
So how can we find out more about the provenance of a batik without knowing who made it. Here some details of a batik from the Wereldmuseum collection in Amsterdam, inventory-number TM-616-1. It is designed as a sarong, so a hip cloth, with a kepala on the left, with a motif build up in squares and triangles, and a badan, the largest part, with a bird of paradise repeated on it. When I got to see it in the depot I found several mended parts. Small holes were carefully sown with matching thread. The selvedge, the edges of the batik were damaged and bigger tears were sown up. Clearly the wearer mended these parts so she could keep wearing the sarong.
Sarongs were and are worn as hip cloths. It was usually worn by women together with a kebaya, a kind of blouse. The kebaya developed from the beginning of 19th century from a long length to a shorter one ending at the hip. The outfit was not complete without a pair of slippers, which were often decorated with beads. These slippers would damage the bottom of the sarong, giving the tears we often see repaired on batiks. So this batik was worn.
The digital database of the museum gives just a small insight in the actual data available, see here the info on this Batik. It will have the date: That can be when it was donated/gifted, acquired, or made. Location, this is often added by a curator or conservator later. When objects were acquired during colonial times, they didn’t really care about the people making it or wearing. It was just another object to display. At the Wereldmuseum they have of most objects still the original inventory-cards. The older ones are handwritten, the newer ones are typed on a typewriter. Through the inventory-cards I could find who donated the batik, which gave me a possible wearer, and through that info a possible location it was from and clearer way of dating the batik.
Mends can tell us also about if the clothing was worn multiple times and was important to maintain, even maybe expensive or precious, so mending was needed to keep on wearing it. This reveals to us something about the wearer. With the research on the white kebaya (link previous post), we got in our hands many kebaya’s of which the wearer was unknown. Not because there wasn’t someone who was living at the right time at the right moment to be the wearer, but because their children were told they never wore such a garment or didn’t tell them anything about it.
The fact it was often carefully stored, already tells us, it was important enough to keep. It could either be the wearer kept it as a memory of a past time, or as as a keepsake of loved ones. This is often the case with batiks, when researching their provenance in museum collection. They were donated not by the wearers themselves, but by their husband or children.
The white kebaya’s were often still with the actual families, providing us with possible data on the wearer.
Kebaya of Annie Glaser on display at KB in Den Haag, October 2024
Photo by Koen de Wit
For the exhibition at KB we showed the white kebaya’s together with the wearers stories and a photograph of the wearer, sometimes also in white kebaya. The oldest kebaya we had on display had such wonderful mends. It was the kebaya of Annie Glaser, the grandmother of Isette Min-Buyn.
Annie Glaser was born in Semarang on Java in 1877 and passed away in in 1959 in Doorwerth in the Netherlands. She was a Dutch teacher who befriended Raden Adjeng Kartini and her sisters in 1902. They often met and wrote letters to each other. The kebaya is of a high quality, made of fabric from European decorated with handmade lace possible from Sumatra. The kebaya was kept her granddaughter Isette Min-Buyn and we hope to find a place for it in a collection were the story of the kebaya can be told.
Small careful mends in the white kebaya of Annie Glaser
Photo by Koen de Wit
To read more:
Post on the Fashion Revolution website 'Five things fashion history can teach us about clothing longevity'
Blogpost 'Too Sad to Talk'
Blogpost 'Zaman of the Batik influencer'
Blogpost 'Ecological, Sustainable & Colonial Footprint'
To take action:
The next Mend In Public Day will be on 26th April 2025!
The idea is simple: get out into your local community and stitch in protest against disposable fashion. Amidst busy Saturday shoppers, we will repair our torn pockets and broken seams and spark conversations on making Loved Clothes Last. Read more here!
Happy Mending!
