An opportunity to honour our clothing

Recession Busting 2023

Drop by Eunoia Fibre Studio one evening this winter, and you’ll find Shaunalee Yates in her element. For practical, political and spiritual reasons – plus pure joy – she and one of her partners, Diana Roxburgh, lead groups of motivated wardrobe upcyclers in regular, two-hour workshops, reviving their treasured garments into new uses. An antique family tablecloth with a gravy stain becomes a unique embroidered shirt. Moths have eaten holes into a favourite wool coat; it’s needle-felted into fabulousness again.

“I feel like I’m trying to save the planet one ‘clo’ [singular of ‘clothes’] at a time,” Shaunalee says.

“I will share everything I know with anyone who wants to learn it.”

This challenging financial time is a window for Shaunalee’s vision to gain a foothold. Instead of being sad that we can’t afford the inexpensive but not environmentally friendly garments that fast fashion tempts us with, having less money to purchase allows us the opportunity to move away from the disposable society model. To relearn sewing, felting, darning, and designing techniques. And, most importantly, to do so in community, for fun.

In Japan, Shaunalee said, the philosophy of Wabi Sabi is well-understood. There’s joy in honouring of the visible history of an object, the mended, repaired, imperfect or even overly loved.

WHERE WABI SABI REIGNS: At Eunoia Fibre Studio in Townsite Mall, co-owner Shaunalee Yates breathes new life into old garments.

Here, she said, locals have begun to wear their self-repaired clothing with pride, revealing patches instead of concealing them. Visible mending is trending. This is political fashion: confronting capitalism’s demand for continuous consumption with creative, thrifty, DIY repair jobs.

Upcycling, she said, is also about the planet. Natural fibres can be composted. Linen lasts for up to 5,000 years – truly! Shaunalee is haunted by images of Chile’s Atacama Desert, where vast mountains of clothing – manufactured in Asia, mostly, under poor environmental and human conditions – will live forever. According to Al Jazeera, about 39,000 tonnes of it pile on each year.

In Dauphin, Manitoba, Shaunalee grew up “frugal” and learned her skills as a teenager from her maternal grandmother. She also had a glamourous aunt who worked as a designer in the US, and brought her fancy fabrics to play with.

“As a teenager if I hadn’t been given these skills I wouldn’t have had much to wear,” she recalled. Because clothing is made so cheaply now, vast numbers of us don’t even know how to sew on a button, or darn a sock.

This financially-cool time has a silver lining, she said, if it encourages us to re-learn skills and embrace slow fashion.