Americans throw away about 17 million tons of clothing and textiles each year, and most of it ends up in landfills, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The rise of fast fashion has made it easier to buy clothes cheaply and discard them quickly.
Inside a classroom in the basement of Wallace Library at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a group of students is taking a different approach.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon and they’re sitting at desks and on the floor, passing around needles and thread. Fabric scraps and half-finished projects are spread across the room.
It looks less like a lecture and more like a sewing circle.
“I think that anyone who has attended a setting where you get people together, crafting and chitchatting, they absolutely get how beneficial it is to the human spirit,” said Hinda Mandell.
Mandell is leading the course, called “Global Craftivism, Gender and Handwork.” A professor in RIT’s School of Communication, Mandell has been studying how crafts like sewing and embroidery can be used as forms of activism since 2016.
As she lectures and leads the class discussions, the students work diligently on stitching a class banner, stuffing felt animals, or sewing personal projects.
Nikki Murello, a game design and development major, started sewing as a hobby. At first, it meant stitching patches onto a denim jacket.
“I like the idea of being very DIY with the stuff that I do, and also it has the added benefit of not buying a lot of stuff,” Murello said.
Over time, the hobby became practical. She began repairing holes in sweatshirts and fixing worn-out pockets on jeans, extending the life of clothes she already owned or found secondhand.
“I like being very conscious about the things that I buy and the places that I buy them from,” she said. “I like buying things from thrift shops and repairing those as well.”
For some students, the appeal is environmental.
Valentine Johnson, an art major, wore a thrifted hoodie covered in patches he made himself from an old T-shirt.
“Because so many clothes go to landfills on a regular basis, like absurd amounts,” Johnson said. “And if you can even sew up, like one T-shirt or one hoodie or just a pair of jeans, and give it new life. Like, that’s super appealing to me.”
He said the class has also changed how he thinks about buying new clothes.
“We’re so, like, involved in this consumerist culture where even just the trends that exist now, like, they come and they go, they’re there for one moment, they’re gone the next,” Johnson said. “And I don’t want to be a part of that. Like, I don’t want to contribute to, you know, more waste when I can create better and great things out of what I already have.”
As the class discussion continues, the needles never stop moving. The students talk about everything — not just environmentalism and sustainability but also inequality and prejudice, personal finance and the economy, future plans, and phone addiction.
Mandell said the work is about more than clothing.
“I think classes on crafting and thrifting and mending and stitching really put people in the here and now, and it makes them encounter what it means to be a human, how to problem solve, how to create something, how to be creative, how to live among a world of objects in a more thoughtful way,” she said.
RIT is offering a new class in the fall called Thrifting and Mending. Mandell is leading that course as well.