When I was a kid, my shirts lasted a decade.
When I was a teenager, my shirts lasted ~5 years.
When I was a young adult, my shirts lasted 2 years, at most.
In the last 20 years, I’ve had 1 shirt last an appreciable amount of time, and that company is no longer in business.
What the hell good is mending when the shirt is already 25% of the quality it was back when we actually mended stuff?
Spare the buttons!
I can spend time mending a shirt or I can move it to the "muck out the stalls" category and buy another for 99 cents. 49 cents if I buy it on the last Tuesday of the month.
It is not sad, just being practical with my time.
my 80 yr old sister darns her husbands socks, and i just buy new ones.
Once in a great while a pair of pants will need mending. Maybe a belt loop has broken. Or maybe a button on a shirt has gone missing. I can have my dry cleaners fix and repair stuff like that. But the cost usually is close to what I paid for the shirt or the pair of pants in the first place. Might as well throw them away.
So we are at an impasse. A battle of the sexes. And perfectly good clothing gets thrown away as a result. Or taken to the dry cleaners or tailor for repair.
Clothes became cheaper and more disposable, that’s all.
In the 50s and 60s when my mom was feeding seven kids on a soldier’s pay, we fixed everything we possibly could, before spending good money on a new replacement.
We kids learned to darn socks, sew buttons, hem, patch, stitch, you name it. Our house had a huge sewing box that was in constant use.
My wife has kept a sewing box over the quarter century I’ve known her, but it’s rarely been in service. Our daughter can sew a bit, but that’s because she loves making crafts. My boys wouldn’t know how to thread a needle if their lives depended on it.
I was taught how to sew & darn...and then I was introduced to duct tape...life changed
I always like it when I go into the schools on inspections and see home economics classes with a bunch of sewing machines set up (though I've yet to see any kids actually working on them. Maybe they don't use them, like the empty wood shop classrooms I find). I also recently saw some state of the art sewing machines at our public library where they offer free tutorials and machine use.
Mending is great. I love altering my clothes, too. Customized! An inexoensive hobby...once you get the sewing machine. I used to do it without the machine but not as well.
May I suggest youtube? Along with a lot of confusion and stupidity, there is a wealth of information. Not only have I learned such things as how to fix my washer, how to “deep clean” my dishwasher, how to change my dining room light switch to a dimmer switch, and how to determine why my car’s air conditioning didn’t work (I did have to take it in but I knew what was wrong and what it should cost to fix) but I have also learned how to darn socks, how to alter clothes, and how to mend sweaters, among many other useful things including some wonderful recipes and step-by-step directions. By the way, I am a senior citizen. Youtube for all its idiocy and idiotic censorship, and know-nothing know-it-alls whose reading aloud skills are on a 3rd grade level, is still an incredibly useful source of information. Anything you are likely to want to know how to fix can be found on Youtube.
Can't stitch together a small hole in a sweatshirt? Can you get anymore useless?
Now, I'm not going to tailor a nice 3-piece suit, or a bridal gown, anytime soon. In fact, I'm pretty inept with a sewing needle. However, I can put a few stitches in a piece of clothing. And if a person had never done it before...ever, not once....I think that even someone with a room-temp IQ could figure it out.
Who needs to mend clothes? Just work them over with the old Bedazzler until they are so sparkly nobody will notice the holes!
I learned how to cook and sew as a kid, still do mend clothes now and then or replace buttons. In the military when the other guys found out I could sew all of a sudden I had a bunch of pairs of pants to hem, I think I made it to a little over a dozen anyway, and told them to bug off, I’ve had enough. I can sew by hand or machine, have several pants now that need hemming, but machine we have is on the fritz, breaks thread no matter what I do. I hate to hem pants by hand...I did all the slacks for my mother’s dry cleaning/alteration shop in the late 70’s. She would measure, mark and cut, hand it to me and I’d iron and sew. I did a hundred or more that year, 1st time I’d ever tried a blind stitch machine.
I’ve been cooking since I was around 5, which was 1960, (toast and badly fried eggs) one of my nieces won’t touch a pizza unless I make it. Her sister would take grandpa and the kids to Pizza Hut, the only thing she would eat was a salad, maybe a breadstick or two. I never knew this till I was around 50.
I still cook daily (live alone), learning to make ravioli now, but I’ve been making bread, including sourdough, since I was in high school, (learned sourdough later though), started on pizza in the 80’s while helping my sister raise 2 girls, also into making quiche, chili, custard, a great chocolate pie...all sorts of stuff many men can barely even spell...I make a cheesecake that’s hard to beat...that reminds me, I have the stuff in the fridge...hmmmm
Kids buy clothes with huge holes ‘worn’ in them on purpose, these days it’s in style.
I don’t know why.
It looks silly.
I dunno...many folks still do minor clothing repairs. I do (though I must admit, if I can get away with an inside iron-on patch, I will).
Our Millenials, not so much I’d guess. Do they even have home ec class I n schools anymore?
As for cooking, there are a good many men that are great cooks. I sometimes suspect moreso than women.