We all know the sensation. You dig out one in all your favorite jumpers solely to search out that the moths have had a area day and crammed it with holes. Don’t panic. Within the first of a brand new sequence on repairing and upcycling treasured gadgets as an alternative of throwing them away, we check out a woollens mending service to resolve the issue.

The Raf Simons jumper above belongs to one in all our colleagues who rigorously shops her knitwear on the finish of the winter in vaccum-packed baggage in her loft. However when she pulled this one out she found, regardless of her greatest efforts at prevention, that it had been ravaged by moths – 4 10p-size holes throughout the entrance. After following recommendation from English Heritage to freeze the jumper for 2 weeks to kill the moth larvae we took the holy knit to our knitwear shoot the place one of many Seam’s makers, Georgia de Castro Keeling breathed new life into the sweater.

London-based entrepreneur Layla Sargent has created the Seam to assist remedy precisely the sort of drawback. Serving to folks to like their garments, the Seam’s rising community of 700 ‘makers’ – comprising Savile Row tailors, theatre costumiers, style college students {and professional} seamstresses amongst others – presently providers 1000’s of consumers, mending garments, not solely jumpers, which may have seen higher days, in addition to altering clothes for the proper match in order to extend the lifespan of a garment.

After being totally vetted, the maker goes to the client’s house or in some circumstances the maker’s studio, to repair your prized possessions. Costs vary from £3 to interchange a button to £70 to interchange the liner of a costume, with the vast majority of jobs – reminiscent of adjusting waistbands on trousers, re-hemming a costume, or mending a tear or gap – costing £15. Made-to-measure and bespoke initiatives have customized pricing agreed between the maker and the client.

Like most nice enterprise concepts, the Seam is the results of a lightbulb second stemming from private expertise. Rising up in Birmingham, 32-year-old Sargent had her seamstress grandmother, Patricia Baxter, tailor her garments to suit her 6ft body and says she thought it was one thing that everybody had entry to rising up – till she realised they didn’t. “Naively, I believed that was regular! However I began to understand that my associates had a really totally different relationship with style – they might put on stuff and throw it away in a short time,” Sargent tells the Observer.

Such dissatisfaction mixed with the rise of throwaway tradition propelled the concept from brainwave to full-blown enterprise mannequin. “As I realized extra in regards to the ever-increasing local weather disaster, I believed, ‘Why can’t we do that higher? Why can’t extra folks have entry to individuals who will assist them love their garments for longer?’”

Statistics affirm the necessity for social enterprises like Sargent’s, who factors to a 2017 report from WRAP that advised clothing-repair fashions supply the potential to increase the typical lifetime of a garment from 3.3 years to 4.5 years, which if utilized to simply 5% of clothes within the UK would save an estimated 80,000 tonnes of CO2 and £5bn in assets used to provide, launder and eliminate clothes.

She additionally has her personal analysis to share. “We interviewed 200 girls in London and located that 81% suppose their physique form is irregular,” says Sargent. “That isn’t by mistake. We’ve grown up attempting to squeeze and squash our our bodies into garments made with standardised sizing which might be primarily made for everyone and no one. What we’ve been left with is that this actually unhealthy mentality that the issue is with our our bodies and never with our garments.”

Subsequent yr will see the Seam develop into yet-to-be-announced new areas of the UK, however earlier than then it’s partnering with rental style service By Rotation to assist its customers restore and restore garments to maintain them rentable for longer. It’s part of the Seam’s ongoing mission to “shut the loop on circularity” says Sargent.

For extra particulars and the right way to use the service, go to theseam.uk