Visible Mending

Remaking Ourselves

A lyrical braided essay on repair, Visible Mending explores clothing, identity, and culture—reframing damage as history and mending as a radical act of sustainability, self-fashioning, and care.

Bold, beautiful, unhidden: Visible Mending reclaims repair as an act of care, creativity, and quiet resistance.

In Visible Mending, essayist, poet, and Emerita Professor Kathryn DeZur turns her keen eye for the intimate and overlooked toward the humble act of repair. Beginning with a small pile of worn, beloved garments, DeZur unspools a layered meditation on mending—not to erase damage, but to honor it.

Blending memoir, textile history, and cultural critique, this book-length braided essay explores the aesthetics and ethics of visible mending within contemporary Western culture. DeZur considers how acts of repair intersect with sustainability, status, fast fashion, and the politics of bodies—touching on fatphobia, ageism, and the pressures of self-presentation. Throughout, she asks what it might mean to live—and dress—in ways that acknowledge wear, time, and transformation.

At once personal and expansive, Visible Mending invites readers to reconsider the stories embedded in the things we keep, the marks we conceal, and the ways we might instead choose to make them seen.

UK Delivery:

• Free delivery on all orders of £10 or more.
• £1.49 delivery fee on orders below £10.
• UK orders are shipped via Royal Mail 2nd Class.

International Delivery:

• Flat rate delivery charges vary by country.

Dispatch and Delivery Times:

• All orders are shipped from our warehouse in Northampton, UK within 48 hours of receipt during working hours.
• UK mainland orders typically arrive within 3-5 working days via Royal Mail 2nd Class.
• International estimated delivery times:
• Europe & Channel Islands: 7 to 10 working days
• USA: 7 to 15 working days
• Rest of the World: 9 to 21 working days

View our full delivery infomation here.