Darning Mark's jumper: Wearing love and sorrow

In the winter of 2010 I darned a jumper belonging to my partner. It was a nice jumper - an upmarket streetwear label - but had been stored in a plastic bin bag, attacked by moths and was now scattered with bullet-sized holes and fraying at the cuffs. In an attempt to make the mending seamless and return this neglected, ten- year-old garment to a state of relative newness, I used three different wools. When the darning was too tight, the ply too thick or the colour wrong, I undid my handiwork and started over again. Despite these efforts, the end result was not quite the feat of invisible mending I had imagined, and his jumper looked somewhat imperfect and scarred. Around this time, I was due to present a conference paper on fashion, clothes and memory. And because it had been his idea to write the paper, and because he was a man who considered himself resolutely outside of fashion, and because he was in hospital and could not attend, I ended the paper by describing Mark's reaction to my not entirely successful darning. Running his hand over the valleys of uneven wool, he said: 'I love that you can see where it's been darned.'