My favorite shirt
Some things are just hard to let go of even if I know I should. This shirt was given to me back in 2016 as a gift from a friend who had bought it at a flea market over in the US, and even by then is was ready for retirement as he had to mend some small holes in it. All in all, at that point the shirt looked pretty fresh at that point but after I started wearing it almost every day it started fraying and I had to decide wether to let it pass into some kind of “archive” (the box where I keep things I don’t use anymore but don’t want to throw away) or to mend it and keep it in rotation. The decision was simple, as I wanted to keep using my softest and most comfortable shirt!
It might be hard to imagine now but back in the 40’s this shirt belonged to someone in the US Navy. Without my later added patches and in a darker shade of blue I’m sure the former owner found it just as comfortable as I do!
Actually I also know the former owners name. F.B is printed above the left breast pocket and the surname Bustamante is also printed on the pocket itself, although it is almost impossible to read it now.
There used to be a Bustamante print positioned just under the yoke on the back as well but the print has completely disappeared now and the fabric is well on its way to join it, as it is slowly giving up. When I started to mend this shirt I wanted to make patching as unobtrusive as possible and preferred to place the patches on the inside of the shirt because I didn’t want it to become “a mended shirt“. I just wanted it to be my favorite shirt, not broken! After I added the rows of white running stitches at the top of the back however I had to accept that this was now a visibly mended shirt and I decided to make the most of the situation.
Inspired by japanese mending techniques like boro and sashiko I decided to stick to a blue-white color scheme and dove into my stash of fabric scraps. I find that nice fabric that feels like it has a soul is very hard to come by if you go out looking for it in, lets say a fabric store, so whenever I encounter something I like I save it even if there’s only a small piece. Having recently written a book about indigo dyeing there was quite an abundance of blue bits in my scrap stash at that point!
Nowadays the shirt is like a walk down memory lane. There are cutoffs from pants made in the tailoring shop where I got my degree and craps salvaged from the floor under the cutting table at the royal opera where I went to work for a short period there after, many different blue tones from testing indigo recipes and fabrics encountered at the denim store I ran in the years that followed. Some of the mendings have even needed mending and nowadays the shirt tends to rip every time I wear it, so there’s always an ongoing repair on it somewhere.
Im hoping that one day the shirt will have enough mends not to rip any more, but I think that day is a couple more patches away yet.
I am submitting these pictures of my shirt to the contest “Sveriges bästa boro“ (Sweden’s best Boro) arranged by The museum of far east antiquities in Stockholm. The contest is open for anyone who wants to participate by posting a picture of a mended garment and use the hashtag #sverigesbästaboro.