Audrey Danser, owner of clothes-mending business Salvage Studio, can’t remember a time when she didn’t know how to sew.
Danser’s mom taught her how to sew when she was very young, and she remembers playing with old clothes, cutting them up and turning them into something new.
“It was a creative household,” she said recently, sitting at her sewing table in her sunny studio apartment a few blocks from Dolores Park. “It was a lot of experimentation and teaching myself,” beyond the basics she learned from her mom.
Today, Danser makes her living — part of it, anyway — patching jeans, darning moth-eaten sweaters, repairing zippers and tending to her clients’ beloved and vintage items. And, in the upcoming weeks, she will host a series of events for locals who’d like to learn how to mend their own clothing or mingle with others who do similar work.
On Thursday, Nov. 7, she’ll offer a mixer for sustainable textile makers. On Saturday, Nov. 16, folks can learn how to mend holes in their sweaters both visibly and invisibly. And on Saturday, Dec. 7, she’s holding a clothing swap.
Danser’s path from an eclectic childhood in Oklahoma to an engineering career to repairing clothing in San Francisco was anything but straightforward.
After high school, Danser pursued a degree in architectural engineering at the University of Kansas. She graduated in 2016 and headed to California for a job in the field, but “I never really felt invested in that career,” she said.
When the pandemic hit, she did what many sewists did: She pulled out her sewing machine to make masks for people to protect themselves from Covid-19. She left her engineering job and, with newfound time on her hands, decided to mend or alter everything in her closet that needed touching up, whether it was a tear, a missing button, or something that didn’t fit quite right.
“I learned a lot by trial and error,” Danser said. “If I didn’t know how to fix something, I’d figure it out, or watch a video on YouTube. After some repetition, you find the best technique.”
Audrey Danser mended this red sweater with darning (the brown squares) and sewed suede patches on the elbows. Photo courtesy Salvage Studio.
A few months into the pandemic, Danser launched an Instagram account called A Thrifted Wardrobe, where she showcased unique finds from vintage and thrift stores (local favorites include Community Thrift and Empress Vintage), offered advice on styling thrifted items, and began sharing tips on mending garments, whether second-hand or from one’s own wardrobe. She built up an impressive audience — more than 33,000 followers. But found the thrift-store influencer space a bit too crowded, and she was getting a lot of attention for her posts about mending.
A friend asked Danser to repair a rip in a pair of jeans, and soon, more of her friends approached her for similar work. She posted to Nextdoor and tacked up fliers around San Francisco, asking if anyone wanted to hire her for similar piecework. Before long, she had a Yelp page offering her skills. Salvage Studio officially launched in September 2021.
Danser’s business arrives at a time when more people are paying attention to the ecological effects of the fashion industry, especially the fast-fashion industry. In 2018, textiles made up 17,030 tons of the waste that wound up in U.S. landfills — 5.8 percent of all municipal solid waste, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That’s almost double the amount in 2020 (9,480 tons), and 10 times the amount in 1970 (1,760 tons).
Many textiles can be recycled or composted, but aren’t; in 2018, only 2,510 tons were recycled. Natural fabrics like cotton, linen, wool and silk are compostable, but synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon, which are becoming more and more common, stick around in landfills for decades or even centuries.
Some individuals and organizations are working to turn the tide. This year, California passed SB 707, the Responsible Textile Recovery Act. It requires textile producers, including those who make clothing, mattresses, carpeting and more, to join an organization that will lay out plans to divert all of their textiles from landfills through repair, recycling and other means. Those who don’t comply would face civil penalties. Goodwill recently piloted a program in San Francisco in which imperfect garments were repaired or repurposed before selling in stores or online.
A vintage Japanese cotton shirt. Audrey Danser repaired a rip in the back of the collar with rows of tiny, machine-sewn stitches. Photo by Beth Winegarner.
Unfortunately, although fast-fashion items can last much longer if they’re mended, it often isn’t cost-effective to hire someone to repair them, Danser said. A customer might spend $10 to $20 for a pair of jeans from Shein, but Danser charges roughly $85 to mend “both back quadrants” (the butt panels).
For someone to pay to repair an inexpensive item, “there have to be other factors: It’s sentimental, it’s their favorite piece, or they want to be more sustainable,” she said. “Part of my job is educating about the importance of: Yes, it may cost more to repair, but you’re investing in your garment, and you’re saving money in the future because you’re not buying something else.”
Danser commonly repairs jeans and denim, in part because it often costs more to buy a new pair of jeans than to mend the ones you have. “Also, when you find a pair that fits, that’s hard to replace,” she said. She also regularly patches and darns holey and snagged sweaters and, on a recent job, she repaired a rip in a vintage Japanese button-down shirt for a client who collects them.
Audrey Danser works on a pair of jeans.
She works periodically with the San Francisco Public Library to offer mending clinics, in which members of the public can bring items in to their local library for her to repair them. The clinics are co-sponsored by the San Francisco Department of the Environment and SCRAP, a reuse center that sells donated craft items, including paper, fabric, yarn and embroidery supplies at low prices.
After three years in the mending business, Danser is happy that she left the world of engineering behind, although she said it makes sense that she wound up in the work she’s doing now.
“Architectural engineering is about structure, and I think of myself as an architect of clothing and restoration,” she said. “What I do is the perfect marriage between creativity and analytical problem-solving.”
Find out more about Salvage Studio’s upcoming events here.
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