Drowning in Clothes: How Textile Waste Is Driving a Craft Revival

As fashion waste accelerates, textile makers in New York and beyond reclaim craft, history, and care as alternatives to disposable clothing– and even capitalism itself.

Looms at the Textile Arts Center, a community studio where people can learn different fiber techniques including loom weaving. Image by Dorothy Bailey

How many pieces of clothing do you own that you never wear? They sit in closets and drawers, folded into uneven stacks or hung in tight rows– shirts that no longer fit quite right, jeans you once meant to patch, dresses tied to a version of yourself you’ve outgrown. Some are nearly new, still holding the shine of a recent purchase. Others show wear: a stretched collar, a missing button, fabric thinning at the elbows. None feel fully disposable, yet they don’t feel worth the effort to repair.

Instead, they linger in a kind of in-between state. Not worn, not discarded, just there. You reach past them every morning, maybe with a flicker of guilt, before closing the closet door and letting them fade out of mind. A shirt you haven’t worn in months becomes years. A pair of pants that just needs a button slips further out of rotation. The question shifts from what to wear to what to do with everything else.

Throwing clothing away rarely feels straightforward. Some pieces carry memory– the dress from graduation, the sweater that still feels like a hug. Others seem salvageable, if only you had the time. So the clothes stay. Or eventually they go– dropped into a donation bin, stuffed into a trash bag, handed off with the vague promise of reuse. Once they leave your hands, their fate becomes abstract, disappearing into a system most people never see.

According to the 2015 documentary *The True Cost*, the average American throws away about 82 pounds of textiles each year. Multiplied across millions of households, that becomes a steady, largely invisible stream of waste moving in and out of closets just like yours.

The cost extends far beyond what ends up in landfills. The fashion industry is responsible for roughly eight to ten percent of global carbon emissions– more than international flights and shipping combined– and generates around 92 million tons of textile waste each year. That’s the equivalent of a garbage truck full of clothing being burned or landfilled every second.

Beyond carbon, textile waste also releases methane, a greenhouse gas that has a more immediate warming effect, further accelerating climate change. Each garment also carries the cost of resource use. It can take about 2,700 liters of water to make a single cotton shirt and up to 7,500 liters for a pair of jeans.

Across the United States, textile waste has become a massive and growing problem. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that Americans generated roughly 17 million tons of textile waste in 2018, with only about 15 percent recycled or reused. The rest was landfilled or incinerated, contributing to long-term environmental damage.

From inside a bedroom closet, the scale of this system is almost impossible to grasp. There are no immediate consequences of holding onto too much or letting things go. But in places where discarded clothing ends up, the system becomes more tangible.

Bags of fabric waiting to be sorted at FABSCRAP, a non profit textile recycling center. Image by Dorothy Bailey

Hidden inside the maze-like corridors of the Brooklyn Army Terminal, volunteers sit shoulder-to-shoulder around folding tables, pulling material from bulging black trash bags and sorting it into piles. The air is dense with tiny fibers and the faint chemical smell of synthetic blends. A low, constant rustle fills the room as sequined swatches, denim scraps, spandex offcuts, and bolts of unused yardage pass through their hands in a steady rhythm: pick up, assess, place. Keep. Reuse. Trash. There is little time to linger on any single piece.

One Saturday afternoon, I took a place at one of the tables to help sort. I reached into a bag and pulled out a swatch book of beautifully patterned fabrics. It didn’t look like waste. None of it did, at least not in the way I expected it to. But the pace of the room made the decision for me. A volunteer next to me gestured toward a bin, and I dropped it in, already reaching for the next piece.

This is a typical day at FABSCRAP, a nonprofit that handles textile waste generated by New York’s fashion industry. What stands out most is not any single item, but the sheer, disorienting volume of what passes through the room.

“We receive about 7,000 pounds a week from 20 to 25 different brands,” said service coordinator Jo Corvus, who has spent years watching the flow of material move through the warehouse. “Across the year, that’s closer to 250,000 pounds.”

Standing at the folding table you can feel the magnitude of those numbers: in the constant thud of new bags hitting the floor, in the dumpster of sorted material waiting to be baled, and in the towering mountain of unopened bags looming in the background– some of them waiting months or even years to be processed.

For warehouse manager Candelle Monteagudo, that constant movement is the point. Her days begin early, walking the floor to see what arrived overnight and what needs to move before the next shift begins. “Every decision here is about movement,” she said. “If something stalls, it takes up space we don’t have. You’re always thinking about where it can go next.”

After sorting, the material is compressed into dense bales, each weighing between 380 and 425 pounds, and shipped out to be shredded into insulation, carpet padding, or industrial fibers. Other pieces are resold through FABSCRAP’s reuse store, extending their life in smaller ways.

The problem isn’t just where clothing goes. It’s how much of it there is. Even when items are carefully sorted, resold, or recycled, the system is still overwhelmed by volume. More keeps coming than can ever be meaningfully reused.

Volunteers sorting fabric scraps at FABSCRAP. Image by Dorothy Bailey

This imbalance, between how much we produce and how much can be absorbed, has prompted a renewed interest in older ways of making and maintaining clothing. Periods of rapid industrial expansion and mass consumption have often been met with a return to the handmade, not just as aesthetic but as a way of reasserting control and connection in the face of large scale production. What’s less clear is whether this moment represents a meaningful shift or simply another response that exists alongside the system it resists.

Today, this pattern is appearing against the backdrop of fast fashion and its environmental consequences. As clothing is produced, consumed, and discarded at unprecedented speeds, making and mending are being rediscovered, not only as hobbies but as forms of resistance, community building, and alternative ways of valuing what we own. Simultaneously, these practices risk being absorbed, commercialized, and reshaped into another form of consumption.

After clothing leaves the closet, it doesn’t disappear. It moves through a system built to handle more than it can hold. At the same time, some people are choosing to slow that movement down and reconsidering what it means to keep something in use. Elsewhere, in places where craft remains part of daily life, a different model already exists.

Taken together, these threads ask what making and mending can actually shift, where their limits lie, and whether they can persist without being absorbed into the systems they resist.

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Craft Across Past Movements

In the late nineteenth century, the first Arts and Crafts movement emerged in response to the rapid industrialization. As factories increased output and standardized production, products became more accessible, but often at the cost of quality and craftsmanship. For critics of industrial production, the issue was not just aesthetic, but moral. Factory labor broke making into parts, separating workers from the objects they produced and reducing skilled work into repetitive tasks.

In response, thinkers like John Ruskin and William Morris argued for a return to handwork, durability, and a closer relationship between maker and object. The philosophy argued that making wasn’t just about the final product but was a way to restore meaning to the process.

But even at its inception, that vision contained contradictions. Morris’s handcrafted goods were often too expensive for the working-class people his philosophy idealized, revealing a tension that continues to shape craft movements today: the desire for ethical production within systems that make it nearly impossible to sustain.

Textiles sit at the center of this history, in part because industrialization transformed them so dramatically. As lace historian Elena Kalangy-Loux explained, within a matter of decades, cloth shifted from being a scarce resource to one of abundance. “Textiles went from something that was an extreme luxury only available to the wealthy into something that was immediately accessible to most people,” she said. “But the price of that was exploitation.”

Before mechanization, textile work could offer relative stability. Kalangy-Loux explains that in many parts of Europe, lacemakers earned wages that were better than other forms of labor such as agricultural work. “These were really cushy jobs for working class women and girls at the time” she said, complicating the common narrative of women’s unrelenting hardship. Industrialization did not invent exploitation, but it reorganized it, scaling production in ways that rapidly devalued handwork.

Clothing and textiles from the Arts and Crafts Movement at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Image by Dorothy Bailey

Similar tensions resurfaced nearly a century later. The 1960s and 1970s saw a full-scale revival of craft shaped by both economic pressure and cultural resistance. As clothing became more expensive and mass production expanded, many people began making their own garments out of necessity, while handmade aesthetics like embroidery, visible mending, and embellished denim became part of a broader rejection of mass-produced uniformity.

Separately, fiber arts were being redefined in the art world. According to Elissa Auther, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Museum of Arts and Design the late 1960s marked a turning point in how textile practices were understood. For much of the early twentieth century, weaving, knitting, and embroidery had been dismissed as domestic or decorative.

“What happened in the late ’60s,” Auther said, “is that artists, many of them women, began to reclaim those materials and techniques and bring them into contemporary art spaces.”

Work by artists like Judy Chicago and Sheila Hicks helped reposition textile practices as both artistic and political, drawing attention to forms of labor that had been long overlooked. Exhibitions such as Wall Hangings at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969 helped legitimize fiber-based work within modernist institutions, even as artists simultaneously challenged the hierarchies those institutions upheld.

This shift also intersected with the broader counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when rejection of mass production and industrial systems began to shape everyday practices. As Auther explained, fiber arts became especially central to this moment because of their accessibility. “Fiber arts are inherently accessible– you don’t need expensive equipment, and they can be learned outside formal institutions– so they become a natural vehicle for this kind of self-sufficiency,” Auther said.

Publications like the Whole Earth Catalog reinforced this ethos, promoting the idea that people could make, repair, and sustain their own material lives. Knitting, weaving, and sewing were no longer just hobbies, but part of a broader ideological shift toward autonomy and resistance to capitalist production systems, where goods are produced quickly and cheaply through mass manufacturing and disposable consumption. Choosing to make one’s own clothing or textiles became, in many cases, a rejection of disposable culture and industrial labor practices, instead emphasizing care and durability in opposition to speed and anonymity.

Magazine article from 1967 showing how to make a DIY bottle tab vest. Image from Real Clothes Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore By Kiki Smith

“The recuperation of fiber arts in the 1970s sits at the intersection of feminism, DIY culture, and anti-capitalist critique,” said Auther. “It’s about reclaiming undervalued labor, but also about rethinking how and why we make things in the first place.”

Yet this revival, too, was incomplete. Certain practices, particularly those coded as overly feminine, like lace, remained marginalized. “You’ll never find huge names in the lace world in these histories of fiber arts,” said Kalangy-Loux. “Lace was ‘too girly.’” Even as fiber arts entered the realm of fine art, longstanding hierarchies persisted, shaping which techniques were valued and which were dismissed.

These cycles extend even further back. Textile traditions have repeatedly moved in and out of fashion, falling out of use and being revived in new contexts. “It just happens over and over again, as far back as cloth-making exists,” said Kalangy-Loux.

What links these moments is not just a return to handwork, but the conditions that produce it. Periods of rapid technological change, whether industrialization, or today’s fast-moving clothing system, often renew interest in slowness and control. “It’s the exact same conversations that are happening right now,” Kalangy-Loux said, pointing to today’s backlash against automation and AI.

In response, making and mending have returned once again, this time shaped by environmental anxiety, digital saturation, and increasingly precarious labor conditions. For some, craft offers a way to reclaim time in the face of constant productivity demands. For others, it functions as a form of coping with burnout, or as a more mindful and personal way of engaging with material goods.

Textiles, in particular, seem to drive this shift because of their proximity to the body. Cloth is both practical and deeply personal, explained Jordana Martin, founder of Tatter Blue Library, a textile library dedicated to the study and collection of textile books and objects. “It’s such a responsive medium,” she said. “We’re making textiles all the time to respond to environments, to augment our comfort, to prepare us to survive different conditions.”

That responsiveness extends beyond function into social life as well. Textile-making, she noted, has long been rooted in collective practices– quilting, weaving, sewing in shared spaces– and tends to re-emerge in moments of stress. “In political times that are more stressful… you get people comforting themselves… by using their hands, and making cloth, and communing.”

Today, these communities take different forms. In mending circles and workshops, people sit side by side, passing garments and demonstrating stitches, while online platforms link dispersed makers into loose networks around repair and making. These practices don’t replace the larger clothing economy, but they offer ways of stepping outside of it.

These histories point to a recurring pattern, showing how moments of rapid production generate their own forms of resistance, while also revealing recurring pitfalls. Craft movements have repeatedly struggled with questions of access, labor, and scale, asking who can afford to participate, whose work is valued, and how to avoid commercialization.

What’s happening today now follows the same pattern. When systems of production accelerate beyond what feels manageable, some people begin looking for ways to slow them down. As Kalangy- Loux put it: “As soon as something goes to one extreme, the other inevitably pops up as well.” It’s unclear whether these small acts of making and mending can grow into something bigger, or whether they will just be absorbed back into the same systems they challenge.

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Mending Against Fast Fashion

I struggled to find a seat when I arrived at the Darn It! Mending Club at the Textile Arts Center. Even though it wasn’t my first time, I was still surprised by how full the room was. People clustered around long tables in small groups, talking over one another, laughing, while at the same time carefully guiding needles through fabric.

Darn It! meets on the first Sunday of each month, creating space for people to repair clothing together. There is no formal instruction, or step-by-step demonstrations, but learning still happens here. Someone leans over to show a stitch, another offers advice on how to reinforce a weak spot, and most people learn by trying, adjusting, and trying again. Much of the work centers on darning, a technique where thread is woven across a hole to rebuild the fabric, traditionally used for socks and knitwear.

The session begins with a “share your hole” circle. One by one, people hold up what they’ve brought: jeans with a frayed hole in the pocket, sweaters eaten through by moths, and shirts split along the seams. That day, I was repairing a hole in my favorite pair of mittens, worn nearly every day through a long winter. Each piece carried clear signs of use, but everyone showed their garment’s damage with pride, as if each hole were a badge of honor.

At the center of the room is Kate Sekules, a mending historian and one of the club’s hosts. She moves quickly from table to table, greeting regulars, pausing to examine damaged garments, and offering suggestions before moving on again. You can spot her easily– bright red hair tied into a floppy bun, black and grey clothing marked with small, neon repairs that stand out against the fabric.

Sekules has been mending since childhood, long before it became more common online. When I asked her about its recent rise in popularity, she didn’t respond with simple enthusiasm.

“Well, it’s amazing, but like everything that’s a trend, you worry that it’s going to go away,” she said.

Visibly mended sweater using a darning technique at Darn It!, a monthly mending club hosted at the Textile Arts Center. Image by Dorothy Bailey

Her concern isn’t the attention, but what happens to the practice as it spreads and how easily it can be reduced to something simply stylistic. Online, mending often appears as a set of trendy techniques, like sashiko stitching, which is a Japanese method that uses straight stitches to reinforce and decorate the fabric, or plaid darns in bright colors. In some cases, these aesthetics have already been taken up by fast fashion brands. For example, you can find patched and sashiko stitched jeans at Free People advertised as “cool and crafty,” and sweatshirts meant to look upcycled with hand sewn patches on Shein selling for $16.98. What begins as a way of keeping clothing in use becomes another trend to be consumed.

Sekules argues that mending is being narrowed when it is treated as a trend. “We just need to keep mending going in every possible way, and not have it just be this trendy little thing,” she said. “It’s a whole way of life… that’s what the world needs– the world needs mending.”

Faux repaired jeans on Free People website. Image by Free People

Mending represents not just a set of techniques, but a shift in how clothing is treated. It interrupts the usual sequence of wear, damage, discard by inserting another step: repair. It slows things down, even if only slightly, and asks for attention in a system that rarely requires it.

This approach to clothing is part of a broader movement known as slow fashion.

The term slow fashion was coined by British academic Kate Fletcher in 2007, modeled after the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy as a response to the spread of fast food and industrialized eating. Just as slow food emphasized local production, transparency, and time, slow fashion developed as a critique of the accelerating pace of the clothing industry.

Rather than focusing on speed and volume, slow fashion shifts attention to longevity. It asks how a garment is made, what it’s made from, and how long it is expected to last. In practice, that can take many forms: higher-quality materials, smaller production runs, local manufacturing, or systems of repair and reuse that extend a garment’s life beyond its first use.

In practice though, these aren’t foolproof solutions. They take more time, often cost more, and don’t always fit easily into how most people buy and wear clothes. The result is a patchwork of small-scale efforts aimed at extending garment life and resisting over consumption.

At Eva Joan, a repair and customization shop in the West Village, the work is technical and highly specialized. Garments are not only fixed but altered, embroidered, and, in some cases, completely transformed. On their website, the store boasts it will “rescue the unsavable and…turn your item into your most prized possession.”

Joy Nuanez, a chain stitcher at Eva Joan, came into the work through freelance embroidery and tailoring jobs after the pandemic. For her, repair isn’t framed as a broader philosophy so much as a practice of learning how to work directly with fabric and the tools used to shape it.

She specializes in chain stitching, a type of embroidery done on a vintage machine that requires full manual control.

Example of chain stitch embroidery, a popular embroidery technique characterized by looped stitches that create a continuous chain. Image by Joy Nuanez

“You’re controlling the needle, not the fabric,” she said. “It takes a lot of brain-eye-hand coordination just to operate and get used to the machine.”

The process sits somewhere between handwork and machine work. The machine produces only a single type of stitch, but every movement is guided by the person using it. It’s a slower process than digital embroidery, which is designed for speed and uniformity, but it produces something visibly different with slight variations, irregularities, and evidence of the hand.

Chain stitching has a long history, appearing in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century garment production, from military uniforms to varsity jackets. It largely disappeared with the rise of computerized embroidery, but in recent years it has reappeared, valued again for its texture.

“People are not just interested in what it looks like,” Nuanez said, “but in the fact that it’s made by hand.”

That interest has contributed to the growth of Eva Joan’s work. What began as a small tailoring operation has expanded to include hand embroidery, visible mending, and more complex transformation projects. The shop has also received increased attention through press coverage, bringing in a wider range of customers.

In recent years, repair and customization have been featured more frequently in fashion media as part of a broader shift towards sustainability and individuality. Shops like Eva Joan have been highlighted in outlets like *Vogue, The New York Times, and W Magazine, *positioning repair as something aspirational, aligned with personal style and environmental awareness.

“Each time they’re in the news, it brings in different types of people,” Nuanez said. “Vogue brought in younger, fashion-focused customers. More recent coverage [on PIX11 News] brought in older people.”

Yet even with that attention, repair remains a difficult sell.

“We have a lot of people who come in and are interested,” she said. “But they can’t validate the cost. People still don’t see the value in it.”

Repair is often positioned as a more sustainable alternative to buying new clothing, but it depends on time, skill, and money, which are resources that aren’t evenly distributed. In many cases, the cost of fixing a garment can exceed what it would cost to replace it, especially when the original item was cheaply made. For example, the creative repairs listed on Eva Joan’s website range from $60 to $250 and above.

This creates a disconnect between the idea of repair and its reality. While mending and reuse are promoted as solutions to overconsumption, they remain difficult to scale and become widely adopted within a system built on low prices and convenience. Choosing to repair is not about status or aesthetic but requires a change in intention and how value is understood.

Materials complicate things further. Many contemporary garments are produced with synthetic blends and lower-quality fabrics that are harder to repair or don’t hold up over time. Even in a shop dedicated to mending, not everything can be saved.

Still, people keep bringing things in. Worn jeans, damaged knitwear, or older garments they’ve held onto for years. Some come for straightforward repairs while others opt for more involved projects like turning old T-shirts into quilts or reupholstering their favorite chair.

Patched sweater by Eva Joan, a specialty tailor shop in the West Village, which offers creative repairs. Image by Eva Joan

In those cases, repair looks less like a quick fix and more like an ongoing relationship with clothing. Garments are not just used and replaced, but maintained over the long-term.

In contrast to the Darn it! Mending Club, where repair is informal and shared, Eva Joan shows what happens when repair becomes a paid service– where caring for clothing becomes labor and keeping clothing in use has to compete with the cost and convenience of replacing it.

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Designing for Longevity

Izzy Kostrzewa’s (they/them) studio sits in a second-floor apartment building about a five-minute walk from Prospect Park. The space is filled with sounds of everyday life, including faint chirps and the occasional loud squawk drifting in from a neighbor who appears to keep a large collection of birds. Inside, the studio is densely packed. Finished jackets and pairs of pants hang in clusters on clothing racks, and bins of fabric scraps fill over from shelves. The studio feels lived in, reflecting an ongoing, active process of making rather than a polished picture-perfect workspace.

By the time clothing reaches the level of repair shops and mending circles, it is already in circulation, being maintained, altered, or extended after the fact. Kostrzewa’s work sits a step earlier in the lifecycle. Instead of repairing after the clothing is worn, they design garments in a way that anticipates repair and long-term attachment from the beginning. For independent designer Kostrzewa, designing for longevity means rethinking materials, construction, and use from the start.

Kostrzewa, who runs the fashion and textile practice Isaboko, builds their work around a set of constraints that double as a philosophy. “Everything we do is based on three core principles, which are only using waste textiles, only using zero waste patterns and centering gender-free design,” they explain. In contrast to conventional design processes that begin with new fabric, their garments start with discarded ones, primarily vintage kimonos from the mid-twentieth century that are taken apart and remade.

Zatsuyo Jacket by Isaboko, a New York based slow fashion brand. Image by Isabella Kostrzewa

This decision came out of a critique of the fashion industry. “Fashion is bad for the earth, bad for people, bad for our health, bad for all the laborers,” Kostrzewa says. Working with existing textiles becomes a way of intervening in that system at its source. “What if you started from fabric that already existed. You aren’t creating a new carbon footprint because this fabric is already decades old.”

A single kimono might dictate the shape of a finished jacket depending on its seams, print placement, or how much usable fabric remains after deconstruction. Instead of sketching a design and sourcing fabric to match, Kostrzewa begins with limitation and works outwards from there. “You have to build a business on the idea that one fabric is one garment and be okay with that,” they explain. This constraint is what ties their work to mending. Like repair, it treats fabric as something already carrying history rather than raw material.

The use of “zero-waste patterning” is part of this ideology, but not a simple solution. Zero-waste design means cutting patterns in a way that uses the entire textile surface, so there is no leftover scrap at the end of production. Instead of traditional garment layouts that produce offcuts, each piece is designed to fit across the fabric like a puzzle.

But Kostrzewa is careful about how far that reasoning can go. “If you make a zero waste garment and then someone decides they don’t want it, it’s 100% waste,” they note. The environmental impact, they argue, depends less on how efficiently something is cut and more on whether it is worn, kept, and valued over time.

That emphasis on value– on why someone holds onto a piece of clothing– connects their work back to the practices of mending and repair. Longevity, in this sense, isn’t only about durability or technique, but about attachment. “How do we rebuild that emotional connection with our clothes?” Kostrzewa asks.

Although Kostrzewa’s designs come with a luxury price tag, with an average jacket costing around $565, they are direct about why. Each garment begins in house with Kostrzewa designing everything themselves and developing multiple prototypes before a final version is decided. Only after that stage is the pattern finalized and sent to production. From there, garments are constructed by sewists working from those instructions rather than being assembled through a standardized factory system.

Kostrzewa originally produced in New York working with local factories in Brooklyn and Queens, but for their most recent batch, production moved to Taiwan, where they are now manufacturing for the first time. The decision they explain is both practical and personal.

“A lot of people feel weird about a sustainable brand producing overseas, but I don’t feel conflicted about it,” they said. After working in both places, they describe Taiwanese factories as more efficient for their scale of production. And, as a Taiwanese-American, Kostrzewa says the partnership allows them to connect more directly with their cultural heritage.

The decision isn’t about rejecting local manufacturing but about what makes a small operation financially viable. “The financial sustainability and the quality of the product makes more sense for a small business,” they said.

After the garments are produced, the retail cost also has to absorb the broader infrastructure of a small fashion practice such as studio space, equipment, shipping, photography, and marketing. As Kostrweza puts it, the garments have to support “all of these other costs” in order for the practice to remain viable.

Even so, they recognize that this price point is out of reach for many people. Rather than ignoring that gap, Kostrzewa builds in other, more accessible ways to engage with the brand through a $10 monthly patch club, zines, workshops, and an active educational presence online. As they describe it, pop-ups often become a place for people to engage with their work without purchasing. “Sometimes people come to pop-ups and just like to meet me and want to talk to me even when they can’t buy anything” they say.

Advertising image for Isaboko’s patch club, a $10 monthly subscription where subscribers receive five patches from vintage Japanese fabrics. Image by Isabella Kostrzewa.

Instead of positioning their work as universally accessible, Kostrzewa treats it as one entry point among many. The garments themselves may be expensive, but the ideas of repair, reuse, and a more intentional relationship to clothing behind them circulate more widely. While mending adds time and care to garments already owned, Kostrzewa’s work builds those considerations in from the start.

These practices don’t offer a single solution to fashion’s scale of harm. They are slower, smaller, and often more expensive, requiring time, skill, and attention in ways that the dominant system does not. What connects them is a shared refusal of disposability. Whether it’s a darned sweater, a chain-stitched repair, or a jacket made from decades-old fabric, each treats clothing as something to live with over time.

“A lot of people are so disconnected that they could throw away their entire closet and start over tomorrow, while others know and value their clothes deeply. I’m interested in shifting that culture–moving away from disposability and toward a different relationship where clothes matter,” said Kostrzewa.

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Craft Communities in Practice

By the time I arrived at Cleo’s Yarn Shop on a Friday night, the chairs were already filling up. Skeins of yarn lined the walls in tight rows– wools, cottons, and fluffy mohairs in bright, saturated colors– while in the center of the room people were gathered around a large table. Low stools were pulled into a loose circle, bags were tucked under seats, and half finished knitting projects spilled onto laps.

When you picture a knitting circle in your head, you might think of your grandma and her friends sitting on plush velvet couches in a stuffy living room, speaking in low voices, but this is not what I saw. Young people spoke loudly and laughed raucously. Someone at the far end was mid-story, their knitting paused as they talked, while others worked steadily, eyes flickering between their hands and the conversation.

Cleo’s Friday night Happy Hour isn’t a formal class; there’s no instructor, or set project; you don’t even have to be a knitter– all crafts are welcome. Some attendees are complete beginners, sitting in silent concentration, faces contorted in frustration; others move their hand effortlessly not even needing to look down. Most fall somewhere else in between, asking questions when they need help and offering up help as easily. A dropped stitch is passed around, a pattern held up for a second opinion, people “ooh” and “ahh” over each others’ projects.

What’s happening inside Cleo’s isn’t just a busy event– it’s the structure the space is built around.

Friday night happy hour at Cleo’s Yarn Shop in Brooklyn. Image by Dorothy Bailey

While mending circles, repair shops, and small design practices intervene at different points in the life of a garment, they also do something less obvious: they create spaces where these practices can be learned and sustained.

Increasingly, craft is not just a way of working with materials but a way of socializing. In studios, storefronts, and within online spaces, people gather to knit, sew, weave, and share knowledge, forming informal networks outside of traditional learning institutions like universities, workplaces, or places of worship.

These spaces also carry long histories as many of these practices have been shaped by forms of labor associated with women– often undervalued or excluded from dominant narratives of art and design. As craft has gained renewed visibility, so too have the people leading its practice and scholarship, reframing textile work as a vital area of art and culture.

To understand how craft operates today, it’s not enough to look at the objects being made. It requires looking at the spaces where making happens and the social worlds that form around it.

“I like to think of Cleo’s Yarn Shop as first and foremost being a third space,” said Jane Guay (they/them), the shop’s manager. “And then being, a retail shop, and a cafe, but yeah, first and foremost, we’re a place to gather.”

This idea connects to a broader issue people often call “a loneliness epidemic,” where many people have fewer casual places to spend time with others outside of home or work. Places like Cleo’s act as “third spaces”– everyday places where people can gather regularly without needing to buy something or be productive.

The shop opened just over three years ago, first in East Williamsburg before moving to a larger space in Bushwick. The move came out of a need to make room for more people. The previous shop had a single table and a couch. The current space was designed to hold large classes, events, and gatherings.

That emphasis shapes everything the shop does. Alongside formal classes, like learn-to-knit, crochet, or weaving on a loom, Cleo’s hosts a rotating set of community events: a monthly BIPOC craft circle, a queer craft circle, a masc and men’s night, charity drives for mutual aid, and political events like tenant rights workshops organized with local groups.

Many of these gatherings are free. None require purchasing yarn.

“We wanted this to not be a space you have to pay for to hang out,” Guay said. “Especially if it’s community oriented.”

That positioning is deliberate and not entirely intuitive for a retail business. Cleo’s sells yarn in order to sustain itself, but it also actively creates space for activities that don’t generate profit, and in some cases, explicitly challenges the systems that retail depends on. “Crafting for the pleasure of crafting is super political,” they said. “When you are rejecting this constant need to make money, when you take your time back and use it for yourself, it’s huge.”

The shop operates in a unique position. It exists inside a capitalist system– it has to pay rent, pay staff, maintain inventory– but it also creates pockets within that system where different values take precedence: time over efficiency, process over output, community over transaction.

The priority of community over profit is seen in the way the store approaches access. Yarn, especially small-batch or hand-dyed yarn, can be expensive, often creating a barrier to entry for beginners. Rather than ignoring that, the shop has built alternative systems alongside its retail model.

At the front of the store, a small white shelf functions as a free library. It’s stocked entirely through donations: yarn, needles, and tools that anyone can take, no questions asked.

“You can take one skein, you can take twenty skeins,” Guay said, using the term for a standard bundle of yarn. “We’re not going to ask you to contribute, that’s the whole point.” The shop also runs a scholarship fund for classes, allowing people to attend without paying. These systems redistribute resources within the space, lowering the barrier to participation without eliminating the costs that keep the business running.

Free Yarn Library at Cleo’s Yarn Shop, stocked entirely through donations and open to anyone, no questions asked. Image by Dorothy Bailey

It’s a practical response to a larger contradiction that runs through contemporary craft. Handmade, slower forms of production are often positioned as ethical alternatives to mass production, but they are also more expensive, requiring time, skill, and materials that not everyone can afford. Cleo’s doesn’t resolve that contradiction, but it works around it in small intentional ways.

The shop’s growth reflects how much demand there is for this kind of space. According to Guay, that growth wasn’t driven by a single strategy so much as a convergence of conditions: the rise of online craft communities, increased attention to material quality in the face of fast fashion, and a broader search for connection after years of isolation during the pandemic.

“After the pandemic, when we all spent a whole year being really lonely, spaces like this became really special,” they said.

Weekly happy hours, like the one filling the room on Friday night, became a central draw. Regulars brought friends, who brought more friends, gradually turning the event into a standing fixture. The shop just recently opened a second location in Ridgewood. Nevertheless, that growth comes with its own pressures. Rising tariffs on imported wool, much of which is sourced internationally before being dyed in the U.S., have increased costs and slowed deliveries. For a store built on accessibility, those details matter.

“We want to make yarn approachable,” Guay said. “But when prices go up, that gets harder.”

The result is a space constantly negotiating between competing demands: accessibility and sustainability, community and commerce, resistance and survival. Across the city, similar tensions play out in other craft spaces in varying forms.

On any given day, the sunlit space at the Textile Arts Center is in constant motion. In the morning it might be quiet– just a few artists working in their studios, but by midday, dozens of children move through for after school programs or camp. By evening, the space transforms again, filling with adults attending classes or open studio hours. At times, everything happens at once: artists weaving, a quilting class working on the loud machines, while a group of artists carefully mixes and weighs pigments on scales in the dye room.

“It’s a shared space,” said Kelly Valletta, TAC cofounder and business owner since 2015. You’ll see artists working in their personal spaces while we have maybe 45 kids in the studio. Then all of a sudden, the entire space is quiet.”

The Textile Arts Center was founded in 2009 as a place for textile artists to work and convene after finishing university degrees, but it has since expanded in a dynamic ecosystem: classes for all ages, artist residencies, exhibitions, and shared studio space, all operating under one roof.

Sewing workshop at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. Image by Dorothy Bailey

Unlike Cleo’s, which centers on gathering, TAC is structured around continuity– how people enter, stay and build a craft practice over time. Many participants move through multiple roles: a student becomes an intern, an intern becomes a resident, a resident becomes an exhibiting artist or staff member.

“We’ve had folks who started as kids in our programs, and now they’re working here,” said Valletta.

However, TAC operates under pressure that makes sustaining the structure difficult. Despite growing demand, such as waitlists for classes, increasing participation, and expanding programming, the organization has resisted scaling up in the way many businesses might. “There’s this idea that growth should be endless,” said Valletta. “But we’re really focused on doing what we do well, not just doing more.”

Expanding space in New York would mean significantly higher rent and financial risk, especially in a moment shaped by inflation and rising material costs. “We could expand and be more comfortable,” she said. “But that would affect our financial ecosystem in a way I’m not willing to test right now.”

Instead, TAC has focused on building internal sustainability: adjusting class offerings based on demand, investing in equipment when waitlists justify it, and relying on earned income primarily from kids’ summer camps over unstable grant funding. Their approach reflects a skepticism toward traditional arts funding structures. While grants can provide support, they are often unpredictable, and in recent years, increasingly politicized.

“It makes me nervous to put so much time and effort into something that’s not guaranteed,” Valletta said. “We’ve seen so many organizations have their funding pulled out from under them.”

TAC has built a model that prioritizes self- sufficiency while still redistributing resources where possible. The organization offers scholarships for classes and fully funded residency spots, supported in part through community funding rather than institutional grants.

That redistribution also extends outwards. Annual events like their holiday market raise money not for the organization itself but for local mutual aid groups.

“It’s important for us to say– TAC doesn’t need your support. Our artists do. Our community does,” She said.

However, Valletta is cautious about framing this as a “craft resurgence,” a term others have used to describe the current moment. “Craft has been here,” she said. “What I see is people making space for it.”

Although this might seem like a small distinction, it is an important one. It pushes the focus away from trends and towards infrastructure. Alongside places like Cleo’s, the TAC expands the role of craft beyond hobby or aesthetic. Instead, it becomes a system of support, where skills are learned and sustained even as the economic conditions around it remain unstable.

Both these spaces suggest that the current craft revival isn’t only about making things by hand. It’s about building environments where this kind of making can continue despite the pressures working against it.

For Lisa Kimura, knitting began as a solitary practice. She picked it up in 2019, and like many others, found herself returning to it more intensely during the pandemic, when long stretches of isolation made hands-on work feel grounding. At the time, she didn’t have a local crafting community. It was her mother who suggested she start sharing her work online.

“I wasn’t expecting to create content for so many people,” she said. “I just had a lot of time on my hands.”

Within a few months of posting regularly, her account began to grow. What started as tutorial-based content, turned more personal as Kimura showed projects in progress, experiments with different fiber techniques, and glimpses into her daily practice. The platform became less about instruction and more about documentation, a way of making her work visible while finding others doing the same.

Craft content creator, Lisa Kimura, knitting in her Brooklyn apartment. Image by Dorothy Bailey

That visibility can function as a kind of entry point. For people who might not yet feel comfortable walking into a yarn store or signing up for a class, social media offers a more low-stakes way to participate. It allows for observation before engagement and for connection without immediate proximity. In that sense, it expands the idea of what a craft community can look like.

At the same time, the structure of these platforms can reshape the practice itself. Kimura points to a tension between knitting as a slow, process oriented activity and the way it is often presented online.

“A lot of the content that goes viral is ‘everything I made in a week’ or ‘everything I made in a month,” she said. “It’s all about how much you produced in a short amount of time.”

The emphasis on output mirrors the same pressures found in the broader fashion system– speed, volume, constant production– even within a practice that is often in opposition to those values. Here we see not an alternative but a space where different logics exist, sometimes uneasily.

Still, the benefits are significant. Social media makes it easier to find other knitters, share resources, and support small designers and indie dyers. It also allows people to build community across distance, something that became especially important during the pandemic and continues to shape how people engage with craft.

“I think it gives me a sense of community within fiber,” Kimura said.

That sense of community is not only social, but also personal. For Kimura, working with fiber offers a counterpoint to her full time job in UX design, where most of her work happens on a screen. Knitting, weaving, or crochet provide a tactile alternative– something outside the digital.

“It’s this curiosity for things that are more analog,” she said. “When you’re knitting, it’s really just you and your needles.”

These spaces, both the physical and the digital, form a layered infrastructure. They provide places to learn, meet others, and spend time outside of strictly productive spaces. Whether it’s a crowded table at Friday night happy hour, a studio filled with artists and students, or a scrolling feed of in-progress projects, each offers a different way into the same social practice.

And, in each case, craft operates not just as an independent activity, but as a means of building and sustaining connection in an increasingly individualized world.

✦✦✦

A Different Way Forward

In Reykjavik, inside the Icelandic Handknitting Association, sweaters are staked from floor to ceiling in soft leaning towers. The greys, creams, mossy greens, and occasional deep blues blur together, forming a dense, forest-like field of color, and the air carries the sweet, grassy smell of sheep. Along one wall, finished sweaters hang in neat rows patterned with traditional lopapeysa yokes, no two exactly alike. A few women stand in the corners knitting, hands steadily moving as balls of yarn roll at their feet. Customers drift through the space slowly, lifting sweaters from the piles feeling their squishy wool and examining colors against the filtering sunlight. Nothing here feels rushed.

The Icelandic Handknitting Association in Reykjavik. Image by Dorothy Bailey

In Iceland the relationship between people and clothing has developed along a different path. Textile knowledge is not something being rediscovered or revived, but something ever present– taught, practiced, and maintained over time. Garments are made with an understanding of how they will wear, how they might be repaired, and how long they are meant to last. The same skills that are reappearing elsewhere as alternatives to fast fashion remain embedded in daily life.

This extends beyond storefronts to the country’s infrastructure. In Blönduós, a rural town in the northwest of Iceland, the Icelandic Textile Center operates as a hub for this knowledge. Equals parts research center and maker space, it brings together artists, designers, and researchers working across both traditional and contemporary techniques.

“We want to build a bridge,” said project manager Katharina Schneider, describing the center’s approach, “between traditional textiles and handicrafts to digital innovation.” That entails not only preserving older techniques and textile technologies but continuing to use these histories and processes as foundations for new work.

That work unfolds within real constraints. Iceland, despite its image as pristine and self-contained, faces many of the same pressures as elsewhere. Most clothing is imported. Fast fashion is widespread. An estimated ten tons of textiles are discarded each day, much of it exported and ultimately ending up in landfills abroad. Even here, the system is strained by volume.

But the response looks different. Rather than focusing only on what happens after clothing is discarded, the emphasis falls earlier: on how materials are understood, how garments are made, and how long they are kept in use. Residents at the Textile Center arrive with defined project ideas, but those often shift once they begin working, influenced by the materials, tools, and conversations around them.

“The environment is inspiring, and the community is inspiring,” Schneider said. “People discover something they might not have known before,” whether that’s an unfamiliar tool, a new material, or a different way of working. The process becomes less about producing quickly and more about responding to what is already there.

Residency studio at the Icelandic Textile Center, a research and makers space in Blönduós, Iceland. Image by Dorothy Bailey

Seen from this perspective, the limits of end-of-life solutions become clearer. A member of the Queens chapter of Beyond Plastics described textile waste as part of a broader failure in how consumers are expected to manage increasingly complex disposal systems. “If people can’t sort plastics correctly,” she said, “how are they supposed to navigate something as complicated as textile recycling?”

Without clearer systems and widespread education, even well-designed programs struggle to function. Focusing only on disposal risks missing the larger issue: how much is being produced in the first place.

Across the spaces I visited, from sorting tables in Brooklyn to mending circles, repair shops, studios, and yarn stores, the same tensions appeared in different forms. Each offered a way of slowing down the movement of clothing, extending its life, or rethinking its value. But each also operated within the limits of time, cost, and access.

In Iceland, those same questions exist, but they are approached from a different starting point. Craft is not positioned as an alternative to the system so much as part of how clothing has long been understood. It is built into education, where knitting and mending is commonly taught in school, into regional economies tied to wool production, into daily practice, where having a sweater made by your mother isn’t such a novelty. Not untouched by globalization, but shaped by a history where making and maintaining were never fully separated from use.

Seen alongside the spaces emerging in New York, it suggests that what looks like a revival may instead be a reassembly of knowledge, of practices, and of relationships that have been fragmented over time.

What remains uncertain is how far that reassembly can go. The forces that shape the clothing industry–speed, scale, cost–continue to structure what is possible. Repair takes time. Ethical production costs money. Resources to participate in textile craft are uneven. And even practices meant to resist overconsumption can be absorbed back into it.

Whether we think about it or not, most of us live surrounded by more clothing than we can wear in one lifetime. For some, that excess is just part of modern life–closets that overflow, garments worn once and forgotten, and the easy assumption that anything can be replaced. But for others, clothing holds a different kind of value. Garments are not just objects, but records of memory and care. From garments preserved in museum collections to pieces passed down or repaired at home, what we choose to keep, and how we decide to care for it, reflects how we understand value on its own.

“It’s not really about bringing craft back; it never disappeared,” said Schneider. “It just has a new audience, and we need to keep using it to respond to today’s issues.”