An Introduction to RepairedRemade
A Shared Love of Vintage
This is a rambling introduction to RepairedRemade!
This is a business that has grown organically, if slowly, from a happy meeting between two people with complimentary obsessions for clothes and textiles and a mutual desire to keep clothing going as long as possible! Our aim is to share beautiful vintage clothes and to upcycle and alter where needed so that the cotton and linen spun and woven in the past can find a place in the modern world and look great again..
Many years ago, I worked in television news. Early on in my career, I was sent with a reporter to film a report about rubbish collection. One of the locations was a landfill site. I remember standing on a mountain of household rubbish and filming as lorry after lorry arrived and simply upended its contents onto the pile below me. In the distance I could see nothing but rubbish and seagulls. The hill I was standing on was rubbish, the walkways and roads were all compacted rubbish. For a moment, it was mind blowing. It was the first time I’d ever thought about what happened to the stuff we throw away. Bits of plastic, sofas, bathrooms, clothes… So many clothes! Everything that had ever been put in a bin was beneath my feet. The interviewee explained that the site was nearly full and that soon they would have to open a new one and start again.
I’d like to say that this was my Damascene moment, but this was the mid eighties when Greed was Good and consumption was rampant and the initial shock of the image dissipated as each new story came along so it took a while for me to put all the pieces together. The feeling never quite left me though and so, eventually, here we are. Now we’re all about awareness and the “natural”... cotton, linen, organic, artisan... Biodegradeable is good but we need to keep remembering that It takes about 10,000 litres of water to produce a single pair of jeans and that the production of cotton is so water demanding that the UN has declared it one of the most environmentally harmful industries of the moment.
You’re here, so you don’t need me to bang on about the environmental upside to reusing and recycling vintage clothing; it’s a given. As is the absolute certainty that if you go to a big event in a hand-painted silk dress from the 1950’s, you’re not going to see anyone else wearing one. Stylish, unique, eco-friendly and a small step in the ending of cloth in landfill. Win. Win. WIN!
Thanks for stopping by and I hope you love what we have to offer. We’re open all hours so click below to browse the current stock.