Repair before replace

When we started keeping notes on what people brought back to the studio, a pattern emerged quickly. Almost everything failed in one of four places: a seam, a button, a hem, or the elbow of a knit.

The three easy ones

A split seam is the most common and the least serious — it is usually the thread that has gone, not the cloth. Restitching by hand with a backstitch takes fifteen minutes and is stronger than the original machine seam. A lost button is five minutes. A dropped hem is twenty.

None of these require a sewing machine, and all of them are the difference between a garment lasting three years and lasting fifteen.

The hard one

Wear at the elbow of a fine knit is genuine damage — the fibre has abraded away and there is nothing left to sew together. It can be darned, but darning is visible, and whether that is acceptable is a matter of taste rather than skill. We think it usually is.

What we do

Every Muse garment is made so it can be opened up and repaired: seam allowances are generous, facings are stitched rather than glued, and buttons are attached with a shank so they can be replaced without damaging the cloth. It costs a little more to make and it is the single decision we would defend hardest.