Learning Clothing Repair Strategies from Soviet and Italian Housekeeping Encyclopaedias for Women Published in the 1960s 

The popularity of repair in academic studies has increased across various disciplines, and scholars from diverse backgrounds now study the potential of repair as a post-growth activity from different perspectives (Graziano and Trogal, ed., 2019). Mirroring this stance on repair, fashion and clothing consumption researchers are increasingly exploring mending practices to address issues of (un) sustainability in the fashion sector (Durrani, 2018; König, 2013; Kucher, 2022; Laitala et al., 2020; Middleton, 2018). These studies sometimes investigate how clothing repair practices can be (re)introduced and diffused; however, most of this research primarily focuses on contemporary manifestations of mending within formal and informal mending communities, while historical perspectives on mending within domestic landscapes remain understudied. Moreover, the research on clothing repair is mainly conducted in the Western world, and until recent times, it has been rarely considered that non-Western perspectives on repair might bring attention overlooked issues in Western sustainability discourse. At the same time, there are societies (like the Soviet ones from the 1960s until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991) where homemaking practices were promoted as a form of consumption pleasure, meaning that different manipulations with clothing were supposed to acquire a meaning of creativity and self-expression and be considered satisfying activities. These strategic efforts led to the popularization of sewing skills, allowing for the successful transformation of collective conventions rapidly and on a societal scale (Golubev and Smolyak, 2013; Gerasimova and Tchouikina, 2009; Kucher, 2024). 

Based on these premises and an examination through the theoretical lens of clothing consumption temporalities (Gurova, 2015), this article considers how such alternative approaches to clothing consumption were actuated, how they can influence the ways in which consumers engage with mending and other mending-related practices, and how the state repair strategies from the past can inform the current debates about sustainability. To do this, I compare Soviet and Western mending histories, through the analysis of 45 encyclopaedias for women, which were published at the same historical stage in Soviet and Italian societies. The comparative study was carried out by adopting the wardrobe method, which “analyses text not only as a fragment but as a story in time” (Klepp, 2017: 31), allowing researchers to investigate how different histories have resulted in different “hegemonic patterns of consumption, structuring people’s public performances” (Klingseis, 2011: 109). 

I begin by introducing the theory of consumption temporalities underpinning this study. Then, I draw a parallel between the histories of clothing consumption in the Soviet and Western worlds. Thereafter, to answer the above-mentioned research questions, I examine examples from women’s encyclopaedias published in the 1960s in Soviet states and Italy. Finally, I will draw my conclusions and indicate the future pathways for studying clothing repair. 

Clothing Repair Within Different Temporalities of Clothing Consumption

To discuss the development of different histories of clothing consumption in the Western and Soviet worlds, I will begin by introducing the theory this article is drawn upon: clothing consumption temporalities (Gurova, 2015). The theory of clothing consumption temporalities, deriving from the research conducted in post-Soviet Russia, was formulated by sociologist Olga Gurova. Her research focused on studying (post-)Soviet Russia, where she analyzed the temporal rhythms of clothing consumption and the transformation of consumers’ daily practices within different social groups, depending on the macro characteristics of societies at a given historical period. Gurova argued that temporality could be understood at both the macro level (type of society, institutional conditions, economic conditions, and the development of retail markets) and the micro level (individual clothing consumption practices of purchase, use, and disposal of fashion objects). The interaction of micro and macro factors produces a specific fashion concept within a particular temporal regime. As a result, Gurova has distinguished four concepts of clothing consumption: permanent, transitional, fast, and slow (Gurova, 2015). 

The permanent concept of consumption in Gurova’s work is associated with Soviet Russia, characterized by the inefficiency of the planned economy. Within the society’s structural conditions, clothes were valued due to their utilitarian nature, and the ability to sew was considered an important cultural practice. In contrast, slow consumption practices occurred after the economic recession in 2008; they resulted from the economic crisis, dissatisfaction with deep-rooted consumerism, and tiredness from endless shopping. These patterns suggest an extension of the lifespan of clothes and a return to the recognition of utilitarian values, as in Soviet times. However, within the framework of slow consumption, the adoption of clothing consumption practices of purchase (buying, exchanging, renting and sharing clothing), use (choosing, wearing, maintaining, caring for, laundering and storing), and disposal (discarding, giving away, or repurposing) are dictated by the consumer’s choice and they are not dictated by need (Klepp, 2023). 

Although Gurova’s findings are centred around the study of the post-Soviet societies, every society has its unique concept of time and prevailing rhythm inherited in the everyday practices of its members. Accordingly, studying these multiple rhythms and temporalities of clothing consumption can be a promising way to unravel the complexity of social differences in space and time. Therefore, in the following sections, I propose to draw a parallel between the rhythms of consumption in Western and Soviet societies and investigate how different histories have resulted in different hegemonic patterns of consumption. 

"Repair Strategy" of the Soviet Economy

The Soviet system’s centrally planned and Western post-industrial capitalist economies represent fundamentally different ideologies and approaches to economic organization. The former was characterized by a peculiar relationship between the one-party state and the population, defined by Fehér, Heller, and Márkus as a “dictatorship of needs” (1983: 89). 

Sociologists call the Soviet system a “repair society” since the planned economy lacked the self-regulating mechanisms of a market economy and, therefore, required continuous improvement, experimentation and anti-crisis campaigns. In other words, it constantly needed repair (Gerasimova and Tchouikina, 2009). 

This repair can be seen as a macro-level phenomenon relative to the Soviet economic system. It was regulated by the state’s effective “repair strategy,” aiming to develop a repair sector to keep a large number of people employed. To make such a strategy possible, the Soviet state decided to design functional or symbolic defects into many Soviet-produced goods. Simultaneously, to make up for the shortcomings of production, the state developed a repair infrastructure, which included various repair services (e.g., repair shops for shoes and clothing). Such services were meant to enable consumers to return low-quality, semi-finished items to conditions suitable for consumption relatively easily and at a low cost (Gerasimova and Tchouikina, 2009). 

Furthermore, the Soviet “repair strategy” was reinforced by the state propaganda of rational desires, standards of good taste, and appreciation of the use value of material objects. As a result, the excessive focus on material possessions was censured, and Soviet consumers were inclined to avoid fetishism, alienation, or commercial calculations. Instead, they strove to see material objects as comrades (tovarishch) to be valued for their reliability rather than their appearance. Accordingly, Soviet-made objects were expected to accompany people for a long time and not be discarded, even if they lost their functional properties “in the same way [one does] not forsake an injured friend” (Gerasimova and Tchouikina, 2009: 62). 

In a culture which had always emphasised collectivity over individuality, taste was not supposed to be a personal matter related to individual aesthetic preferences, but rather, it was considered an important social and political choice (Golubev and Smolyak, 2013). 

Obeying the dress code was thus interpreted as a manifestation of being a loyal citizen (Vainshtein, 2007), while autonomous consumption, the possession of power in independent choice, and private accumulation could diminish the state’s authority and undermine the system (Gurova, 2015). 

While the party claimed to know the public’s economic and social needs, mainly without reference to the desires of ordinary people, Soviet consumers were left feeling bereft that their needs had not been met. The failure to provide “quality, ready availability, and choice” became a political problem for all socialist states (Verdery, 1996: 27). Furthermore, mass-produced Soviet goods were subjected to strict state standards and often lacked items in popular sizes, shapes, or designs. As a consequence, the everyday life reality of scarcity and limited choice led to occasional resistance to the party’s control of consumption among the population. These acts of resistance were manifested in private exchange, the black market and the embrace of personal style (Bogdanova, 2015). 

Out of necessity, the art of making and re-making clothes became important acts through which Soviet identities were performed. Manipulations of material objects gained widespread popularity; as Gurova observed, “people sewed clothes, repaired them, constructed new ones from the old, and beautified ready-made items” (2015: 137). Such modifications and adaptations were carried out by most Soviet people, both within domestic environments and in ateliers or by professional seamstresses. These cultural practices allowed people to use and repair things continuously, justifying the name of the “repair society.” Furthermore, these practices became a useful tool for creating communities and even what Golubev and Smolyak have called “imagined geographies – when, for example, Soviet women copied dress designs spotted in Western films” (2013: 520). In this way, they formed the social fabric of Soviet life within a slow temporality of permanent consumption. 

Planned Obsolescence of the West

While the Soviet societies’ “dictatorship of needs” extended its power by a central authority, Western societies directed people’s conduct through decentralized efforts. The industrial revolution of the mid-19th century slowly led towards high production volumes in Europe and North America. As a result, by the mid-1870s, overproduction became the North American “most troubling social evil” (Slade, 2006: 9). Large amounts of unsold consumer goods were filling warehouses, and the industry was frequently forced to suspend its production (Burns, 2010). Consequently, on the one side of the spectrum, there was a significant number of unemployed people eager to work, and on the other, many fully equipped factories ready to produce. 

This condition continued in subsequent years until the late 1920s, when the American industry saw the need for new strategies to stimulate mass consumption. Then, in the 1930s and again two decades after the Second World War, the considerable political and economic turmoil in the world led product obsolescence to be seen as a means to revitalize an ailing economy. The aim of obsolescence “was to encourage new product ideas, remove any potential for economic stagnation and enable workers to earn money to buy new products” (Burns, 2010, 42). Simultaneously, resources were relatively cheap and abundant, and it allowed the American capitalist economy to encourage consumers with disposable income to purchase an ever-growing number of low-quality goods and replacing them promptly. 

In his book The Consumer Society, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard described the “throwaway society” of the 1960s, which was depicted as “fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods” (1970 [1998], 25). Within this framework, and with some rhetorical flourish, he claimed that products were not produced for their “use-value or possible durability, but rather with an eye to their death” (Ibid., 46). According to Baudrillard, such patterns of consumption inevitably modified human ecology, since affluent people in affluent societies were “surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects” (Ibid., 25). Consequently, he argued, they started to see consumer goods as a symbol of power and not as products resulting from “work or from a production process” (Ibid., 31). Baudrillard also wrote about the consequences of obsolescence built into products, emphasising that such strategies have generated serious “environmental nuisances” (Ibid., 39). 

Yet, it was the American journalist Vance Packard who put a new perspective on the term “obsolescence,” differentiating, at the start of the 1960s, between the obsolescence of function (occurring when newer alternatives replace a product or technology), the obsolescence of quality (occurring when the product is intentionally designed to have low quality, and therefore break or wear out quickly), and the obsolescence of desirability (occurring due to styling, which makes the product less desirable) (Packard, 1960). The first type of obsolescence— the functional type, in Packard’s words—is the one which “we all applaud” since it introduces a “genuinely improved product” even though buying it means doubling one’s equipment (Ibid., 37). The obsolescence of function and quality received less attention in Packard’s work, since he found the obsolescence of desirability to be the most controversial and subtle, and therefore deserving more scrutiny. 

According to Packard, the obsolescence of desirability was pioneered in the field of clothing and accessories, particularly those for women. In response to consumers' desire for constant change, manufacturers could not wait to produce goods for the slow process of functional obsolescence. Consequently, the strategy of giving the “illusion of change” through styling came into play whenever the “reality” was unavailable. This is how, by the 1960s, the field of fashion in the U.S. “had become a twelve-billion-dollar industry” (Ibid., 47), and designers in other areas started to study fashion obsolescence techniques created by “styling.” Fashion obsolescence techniques, for instance, included the change of predominant colours, the degree of ornamentation, or profile (e.g., moving the hemline up and down, widening the waist, or broadening the shoulders). This emphasis on style caused product designers and consumers alike to be preoccupied with the appearance of change rather than the real values involved in creating change. 

“REPAIR” VERSUS “THROWAWAY” 

As evidenced by the comparison of Soviet “repair societies” and Western “throwaway societies,” Soviet societies undoubtedly had certain specific traits, mainly due to the fact that the Industrial Revolution came relatively late to Russia and the majority of its population remained rural up to the middle of the 20th century (Vihavainen and Bogdanova, 2015). Moreover, the transition to the market economy of post-Soviet countries occurred only in the early 1990s, and the fast rhythm of consumption arose only in the mid-1910s. Therefore, the practices of unintended but real sustainability (Jehlička et al., 2020) of the Soviet world did not vanish in the same way as those of the West and may still persist in some post-Soviet landscapes. In contrast, the prolonged dominance of fast rhythms of production and consumption in Western “throwaway societies” has contributed to the decline in clothing repair knowledge and competencies, which have progressively faded away through lack of application. To verify if these assumptions hold true, in the following section, I will review the mending history in both Western and Soviet contexts and compare women’s encyclopaedias published in the 1960s in Italy, where mending practices started to fade relatively early, with Soviet ones, which illustrate how the same practices flourished until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

COMPARING SOVIET AND WESTERN MENDING HISTORIES 

Moreover, this knowledge and these competences were considered essential to the domestic economy. They were invariably the cultural property of women, and basic sewing and mending skills were used to extend the lifespan of clothing and home textiles in every possible manner (König, 2013). However, not everyone had repair competencies then, and many people wore non-mended clothes (Durrani, 2019). In the 19th century, most of the Western countries began supporting women’s education, and women started to learn sewing, mending, and other crafts (Klepp, 2022; Durrani, 2019; Cole, 1982). This education, however, often reflected class distinctions. In UK, for instance, this skill set aimed to provide opportunities for women to find employment as teachers in missionary schools or as domestic staff (Cole, 1982). In contrast, middle- and upper-class women acquired the set of sewing and mending skills more likely to represent the domestic ideal rather than due to economic necessity (König, 2013). As for Imperial Russia, according to Vainshtein, all women, regardless of social status, were taught sewing and mending (2007). Therefore, the development of sewing and mending competencies occurred both in the West and Imperial Russia and at that time, they were deeply entrenched with utilitarianism. 

By the end of the 19th century, as industrialization progressed, clothing in the Western world had become more affordable; however, clothes were still not considered disposable. They were designed and produced presupposing a long life further extended by repairs (Durrani, 2019). In concomitance with clothing repair practices within the domestic landscape, the network of commercial repair services for items such as garments, shoes, and umbrellas started to emerge. Within this framework, the profession of tailors and seamstresses began to be appreciated. Hence, there still was an expectation that all goods would be mended—poor people would do it themselves, while the wealthy would pay someone else to do it (König, 2013). Most of the Russian Empire’s population at that time was rural, and sewing was considered an essential element of school education and thus was a common skill. Therefore, the work of the seamstresses was not valued and was poorly paid. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, when the network of the state ateliers was not developed yet, seamstress services started to be appreciated and were in high demand. Their spike in popularity could be explained by low prices, which attracted low-income customers who could not afford to buy ready-to-wear clothes from state-owned shops but could afford tailored clothing made by seamstresses (Vainshtein, 2007). 

During the difficult economic period of the 1940s, repairing clothes within domestic landscapes in both contexts persisted, but it acquired particular cultural significance in the UK. All resources were directed towards meeting military needs, and repairing clothes was perceived as a patriotic civic duty, which was evidenced, for instance, by the British campaign ‘Make Do and Mend’ (Bide, 2024). It offered detailed instructions on repairing clothing, revitalising them, and effectively re-using old fabric (Gwilt, 2014; König, 2013). This campaign is often compared with today’s mending practices in the West, despite the fact that it was born from time of severe deprivation and economic hardship for most people and, as Bide has argued, actually prompted further consumption and therefore is not always a good model for reform in today’s fashion systems. 

As described in the previous section, post-war austerity gave way to economic regeneration in Western and Soviet contexts in very different ways. In North America and much of Western Europe, cheap, mass-produced goods became widely available, rendering the imperative of mending redundant. In Italy, in particular, this shift was intertwined with the country’s distinctive socio-economic and cultural transformation during its “economic miracle”—a period from 1952 to 1973 characterized by rapid modernization, urbanization, and sustained growth rates among the highest in Europe (Zamagni, 2018). 

During this period, Italy was undergoing a profound transformation. The country, once predominantly rural and agrarian, experienced significant urban migration as millions of Italians moved to cities in search of better opportunities. This urbanization was influenced by the industrial growth of the Northwest, which had long been the nation’s economic engine, hosting its largest corporations. The Northeast and Centre, which emerged as new economic powerhouses, were driven by the rise of specialized small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Meanwhile, the Catholic Church continued to influence Italian society, advocating for traditional values, including frugality and modesty, even as the country modernized (Zamagni, 2018). Despite these traditional undercurrents, the economic boom gave rise to a new consumer culture, especially among the urban middle classes, who began to aspire to more modern and glamorous lifestyles where mending came to be seen as both old-fashioned and unnecessary (Kucher, 2022). 

This cultural shift is vividly reflected in the content of the popular women’s publications of the time, such as Enciclopedia della Donna [Encyclopaedia for Women] (1962) (see Figure 1) and Mani d'oro [Golden Hands] (1966), both published by Fabbri Editori. These encyclopaedias were comprehensive guides aimed at educating Italian women on a wide range of topics deemed essential for their roles as homemakers and women in society. 

Figure 1

Front cover of Italian publication Enciclopedia della Donna, volume 1, 1962. Author’s personal collection (Kucher, 2019). 

The overview of the Enciclopedia della Donna illustrates that within twenty volumes with approximately 290 pages each, only a few pages were dedicated to clothing maintenance. According to these publications, Italian women were expected to aspire to become stewardesses, models, or secretaries, and among the things they had to know about clothing was the following: how to choose clothing for a specific occasion, how to iron and wash them, and a few tips on how to beautify clothes with embroidery, lace, and crocheting (see Figure 2). 

In contrast, Mani d'oro (1966) (see Figure 3), published in fifteen volumes, covered a vast spectrum of fibre crafts, including embroidery, crochet, knitting, macrame and sewing. The instructional material of these encyclopaedias was beautifully illustrated with step-by-step photographic instructions, divided into small sections (only 2-3 pages long). These sections covered a variety of techniques and were arranged in rotating mode through the volumes, providing a progressive learning experience for the reader. However, within the fifteen volumes of this encyclopaedia examined for this study, there was absolutely nothing found on mending, and craft practices were represented as one of many possible ways to spend one’s free time. 

These publications for women portrayed a more glamorous and hedonic lifestyle, favouring ways of living that value pleasure, beauty and enjoyment (Kucher, 2022). By emphasizing decorative and creative pursuits while downplaying practical domestic skills such as mending, these widely distributed encyclopaedias undoubtedly shaped how women perceived their roles and leisure activities in the 1960s, while at the same time mirroring a broader economic and cultural shift of the era. Even so, the content of encyclopaedias alone cannot provide a comprehensive account of all domestic practices, and to gain a more nuanced understanding of maintenance practices, one would need to consider additional sources, such as wardrobe studies and oral histories, which could offer deeper insights into the domestic realities and the diversity of experiences that existed alongside the ideals promoted in these publications. 

In the 1960s, the Soviet culture of making things at home intensified and took new shape. The increase in making activities within a domestic landscape coincided with the continuing urbanization of Soviet citizens. In the 1960s, for the first time in Soviet history, the urban population exceeded the rural, and the state had to accommodate the aesthetics of traditional peasant practices to the modern urban lifestyle. Accordingly, the concept of kulturnost (culturedness) was applied to direct this accommodation. This concept was born in the 1930s and was the constitutive conception of Stalinist culture (Golubev and Smolyak, 2013). It relied on the Soviet norms of modesty, a sense of moderation, and property. Showing material prosperity was considered indecent, and within this framework, care for the body and its appearance played an important role (Gurova, 2015). 

To enact such homemaking activities and to support the self-fashioning of Soviet people, the Party adjusted the content and the publication numbers of women’s magazines and books for housekeeping. Such publications had always been essential to Soviet homemaking and repair ideology. It is illustrated, for instance, in 300 Poleznikh Sovetov (300 Useful Tips) (Fedorova,1958) (see Figure 4), which includes an entire chapter dedicated to maintenance and clothing repair (see Figure 5), or in the publication Molodoj khoziaike (To a Young Housewife) (see Figure 6), which included a chapter entitled “Clothing.” Within the latter, numerous suggestions are provided, ranging from “Kak krasivo odevat'sia” (how to dress beautifully), to “kak odevat'sia doma” (how to dress at home), to instructions on doing laundry, ironing, removing different kinds of stains, altering, sewing, and mending clothing (Volkova, 1958) (see Figure 7). 

Before the implementation of Khruschev’s reforms, which were conceived when the USSR was working on its sixth five-year plan for the development of the national economy (1956-1960) with the aim to educate specialized workers needed by industry, women’s magazines such as Rabotnitsa or Krestianka included patterns written in a technical language that was difficult to understand without proper training. Moreover, these publications did not include instructions on how to design clothing, nor did they include instructions on constructing new clothes from the old ones. In the 1960s, the Party introduced uroki truda (labour education) at schools, initially as a form of internship training in the industry (for instance, in sewing factories) and later as a compulsory gender-separated school subject. Introducing this subject into the school program led to the popularization of sewing skills and professional sewing language competence. Accordingly, women of the 1970s were much more adept at understanding and executing the same design descriptions that had puzzled women of the 1950s (Golubev and Smolyak, 2013). Naturally, as the audiences of such literature for women grew, the number of their publications also increased significantly. For example, in 1956, there was only one book, including large sections on mending, revitalizing, and making clothes; in 1958, the number rose to fifteen titles; in 1960, the number of such titles rose to thirty. Their press run numbered millions of copies, saturating the Soviet market with advice on how to make, revitalize, and mend clothes at home (Ibid.). 

Insofar as encyclopaedias can be used to ascertain social and cultural values, a comparison between Italian encyclopaedias and Soviet women’s housekeeping literature confirms that in the 1960s, Italian and Soviet societies had completely different moral values, economic conditions, and consumption patterns. The image of dolce vita created by Italian publications, suggesting what to wear when going on vacation, for example, indicates aspirational values that assume the desirability of a fast consumption rhythm. Although it may not have been the case that mending practices were gradually disappearing on the ground, the encyclopaedias, which imagine an upwardly mobile and affluent reader, do not make them visible. Simultaneously, within the framework of Khruschev’s reforms of the 1960s in the USSR, mending practices were not only flourishing within the Soviet culture of making things at home but were intensified and shaped into a form of consumption pleasure which was progressively growing until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

The specifics of Italian fashion practices in 1960s encyclopaedias for women cannot, of course, be simply transferred onto cultural practices that encompass the rest of Euro-America and the whole of the twentieth century; however, there are sufficient suggestions in the examples scrutinized across a wider sample that can be mapped onto wider patterns of increased consumer choice, the desirability of the purchase of new goods, and the concepts of fashion obsolescence outlined above. It is important to note that Western mending history does not end with the coming of affluent societies since the transition from one temporal rhythm to another is not linear: “Changes in temporality do not mean that one rhythm is replaced by another one” (Gurova, 2015: 133). Therefore, societies are constituted by various overlapping rhythms (Shove et al., 2020 [2009]). It is evidenced by more modern publications on mending, such as L'ABC del taglio, cucito e rammendo (The ABCs of cutting, sewing and mending), published in the late 1970s in Italy (see Figure 8), which contains an entire chapter on clothing repair, including the techniques of invisible mending (see Figure 9). This publication reveals that, despite prevailing consumerist trends, practical domestic skills like mending retained their relevance to a degree. It suggests that alongside the dominant culture of fast consumption, there was still a persistent awareness of the importance of sustainability and resourcefulness, reflecting a more nuanced and layered understanding of domestic practices in an era of rapid economic and cultural change. 

More recently, after the emergence of the Fashion Revolution grassroot-level movement in 2013, information regarding the environmental impacts of the fashion industry started to reach larger audiences and “the pleasure of endless shopping has been replaced by the shame of its consequences” (Gurova, 2015: 138). Therefore, slow fashion practices, among some campaigners and some enthusiasts, have become more widespread and no longer associated with material deprivation. Within the framework of the slow temporality of clothing consumption, statements such as “mending has died out” (Clark, 2008: 434) have lost their actuality and are surpassed by what some have claimed to be a “mending revolution” (Klepp, 2022: 18; Wackman and Knight, 2020) actively gaining popularity among select audiences in both Western and post-Soviet worlds. 

This article illustrates that despite the increased interest in clothing repair among academics and selected groups of fashion practitioners, the research in this area is somewhat limited and mainly centred upon the Western world. By applying Gurova’s theory of consumption temporalities, reviewing literature on clothing repair, and comparing Soviet and Italian encyclopaedias for women, this article illustrated two contraposed consumption ideologies where, on the one hand, the industrialization of the West and its capitalist strategies led to a gradual decline of clothing repair knowledge and competencies; and on the other hand, late industrialization and late transition to market economy in Soviet states resulted in a complex repair strategy, which aimed to shape production and consumption patterns in all socialist states. To make such a strategy possible, the Soviet system promoted homemaking practices as a form of consumption pleasure by adjusting the content and the publication number of women’s magazines and books for housekeeping and by re-introducing repair into the educational system (Gerasimova and Tchouikina, 2009; Golubev and Smolyak, 2013). These strategic efforts provided the elements of which the desired ways of consumption could be made, led to the popularization of sewing skills, and enabled consumers to acquire and gradually develop the competences necessary to enact a series of interconnected clothing consumption practices. 

The idea that daily lives can be planned on such a scale, with such precision, and so effectively is undoubtedly intriguing. However, similar strategies would be rather difficult to adopt in contemporary societies, where the state has a limited ability to control individual consumer practices and the consumer’s ideological visions of the good life (Shove et al., 2012). At the same time today, in the Western context, as demonstrated by the significant surge in mending-related content on social media (see Kucher, 2024; Harvey, 2019), and the increase in non-academic publications on mending (Kucher, 2024: Klepp and Tobiasson, 2021), the number of people willing to engage with clothing repair practices is growing. These changes imply that mending is becoming more normal as more people are willing to participate in clothing repair practices. Thus, if we compare the Soviet state’s strategic efforts to provide the elements enabling clothing repair practices (e.g., promotion of homemaking as a form of consumption pleasure, mending literature targeting amateurs, and formal repair education at schools) with the elements enabling mending in contemporary Western societies, it becomes clear that by re-integrating mending teaching and learning into school education, governments can reproduce versions of normal and acceptable ways of life, increasing the chance that more rather than less sustainable consumption patterns persist and thrive. How this might be done is as complex as the question itself, and there is considerable scope for more research into the subject. 

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Author Bio

Article Citation

MLA: Kucher, Iryna. “Learning Clothing Repair Strategies from Soviet and Italian Housekeeping Encyclopaedias for Women Published in the 1960s.” Fashioning Sustainment, special issue of Fashion Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2024, 1-22. 10.38055/FST030105. 

APA: Kucher, I. (2024). Learning Clothing Repair Strategies from Soviet and Italian Housekeeping Encyclopaedias for Women Published in the 1960s. Fashioning Sustainment, special issue of Fashion Studies, 3(1), 1-22. 10.38055/FST030105. 

Chicago: Kucher, Iryna. “Learning Clothing Repair Strategies from Soviet and Italian Housekeeping Encyclopaedias for Women Published in the 1960s.” Fashioning Sustainment, special issue of Fashion Studies 3, no. 1 (2004): 1-22. 10.38055/FST030105.