Kate Sekules

About Kate Sekules

Kate’s mission is to spread the mend, foster community, and get us all codesigning our own wardrobes. A writer, historian, teacher, and lifelong practitioner, she is the author of MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto (Penguin, 2020), and her work has been featured in the New York Times, Selvedge, Fast Company, Vogue, and Nylon, among others, and exhibited widely. She is a professor of fashion history at Pratt Institute, a frequent lecturer, speaker, and tutor (FIT, Parsons, Winterthur, RISD, and British Museums, Textile Society of America, Custom Collaborative, etc), and the mending author for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation, A History and Theory of Mending, at Bard Graduate Center, New York, after which she will have actually earned the title Dr Mend—her alter ego who dispenses “mendication” Rx in regular clothes surgeries. In former lives Kate was a journalist (New York Times, Food & Wine, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian…), entrepreneur (Refashioner, personal wardrobe trading site, est. 2009), and boxer (memoir: The Boxer’s Heart, Random House, 2000, 2012). She launched Visible Mending eight years ago, and, as @visiblemend hosts #MendMarch on Instagram. This year will be the sixth. She hopes to see you there.