Vessels: Garment Repair as Intergenerational Storytelling

By Brooke Garner and Julie Vo

"Vessels: Garment Repair as Intergenerational Storytelling is a Pratt Institute faculty-led research project that explores garment repair and reworking as intergenerational practices of care and collaboration. The project situates clothing as a vessel for embodied knowledge and storytelling and asks: How can collaborative garment investigation and repair function as a relational methodology for processing grief and engaging intergenerational knowledge? How do garments belonging to loved ones serve as material sites of memory and storytelling? How can collaborative garment repair cultivate practices of collective caregiving?

Through a series of one-on-one collaborations, participants share garments connected to ancestors or loved ones who have passed. Each collaborative session begins with a grounding meditative session while participants hold the garment, followed by a reflective conversational interview that invites sensory, emotional, and memory-based responses. Repair or reworking strategies are then developed collaboratively, allowing the garment to be mended, transformed, or reconstructed in ways that honor both its history and personal significance. Participants may choose to have the garment repaired or reworked so that it can be worn again, offering a renewed state of embodiment.

The project frames garment repair not simply as technical restoration but as an ethical material practice and act of service, tending garments left “in limbo” while keeping the stories and relationships embedded within them. By foregrounding repair as both craft and ritual, Vessels asks broader questions about material care, temporality, and undervalued forms of domestic labor. In doing so, the project challenges dominant fashion systems grounded in disposability and proposes repair as a model for responsible material stewardship."