Hands, Fabric, Feeling: Home Garment Sewing, Material Engagement, and the Sustainability of Attachment

Abstract (English)

This paper explores home garment sewing as a feminist creative practice that, through embodied material engagement, enacts a form of sustainable world-making. Drawing on my Thinging Through Sewing research which examines the lived experiences of contemporary home sewists in Canada, I argue that sewing not only fosters sustainability through the emotionally durable attachments it creates between makers and materials but it also gives us insight into the mechanisms through which emotional durability is created and operates. Material Engagement Theory (Malafouris, 2013) provides the framework for an analysis that responds to the current crisis of hyper-consumption of fast fashion (Fletcher 2010; Lavergne 2015; Armstrong, Niinimäki, and Lang 2016). One aspect of late-stage capitalism is the generation of a social, cultural, and environmental complex now called the sacrifice zone of fashion where Indigenous clothing practices (including forms, technologies, and meanings) have been mostly but not entirely replaced by Western fashion and its exploitative structures (Niessen 2020). Seen this way, sewing is more than a means to an end: it is a way of thinking through doing, a process in which cognition, affect, and action are entangled through tactile engagement with fabric, tools, and techniques. The Canadian women interviewed about their own sewing practices described filling their wardrobes not a quick hit of shopping but as mode of inquiry, through which they generate knowledge that is grounded in the body, in care, in deep attentiveness to materials and their affordances, and through processes of cognitive engagement that generate pleasure and wellbeing. Rather than seeking environmental solutions within the dominant capitalist fashion regime, data from my study of home garment sewists suggest that sustainability might be addressed by questioning (and putting the brakes on) the drivers of overconsumption. I propose an alternative approach to fashion that is rooted in emotional durability — the capacity of garments to remain meaningful over time because of the care invested in their making or repair (Chapman 2005, Burcikova 2021). The sewists I interviewed described their clothes not only in terms of fit or function, but also in terms of feelings such as pride, joy, confidence, and comfort, and emphasized the satisfaction (and challenges) of making. These feelings are not incidental but central to the garments’ continued use and value. As such, emotional durability becomes a form of resistance to disposability, grounded in everyday material practices. By centring home sewing as a site of feminist and ecological engagement, this paper contributes to ongoing conversations about the role of creative practice in rethinking consumption, sustainability, knowledge, and affect. Sewing, I suggest, offers more than a critique of consumerism—it proposes a different kind of relation, where sustainability is understood in terms that expand beyond materials and metrics, to include feeling, attention