Repairing holes so that clothes look like new again
Print Edition
Xu Qiaozhen, 61, stretches a corner of a T-shirt over a wooden darning egg and uses a needle to carefully repair a hole in the fabric.
Crouched over a magnifying glass on a small table, she works for three hours before the tiny hole disappears.
Xu is one of a dying breed of darners in Shanghai. She lives in an old red brick residence on Zhoushang Road in the city’s northeastern Hongkou District. In a rough lean-to built alongside, she works from 9am to 5pm every day in a space barely large enough for the table and her chair.
“The darning industry has passed its heyday,” Xu says. “There are fewer and fewer people doing it nowadays. People don’t want clothes repaired anymore. If they become worn, they just throw them away.
Xu and her husband have kept alive a darning business that was first started by her father Xu Jianyuan decades ago. Now 92, the elder Xu worked as a darner for 75 years and was considered one of the best in Shanghai.
Darning interweaves the tiny threads surrounding a hole to “patch” over it as invisibly as possible. The treads have to match the fabric, and the result should look neat and blended.
“This is even harder when the cloth has exquisite patterns or is woven with high density,” Xu says. “For some garments, there will always be some mark of darning. I always tell my customers that in advance.”
Sometimes it may take her three days or more to patch a hole smaller than a coin.
Darning in China reached its pinnacle during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In the classic novel “A Dream of Red Mansions” by Cao Xueqin, there is a scene describing how the maid of main protagonist Jia Baoyu darned a coat of peacock feathers for her master. It took her all night and left her ill from overwork.
In the late Qing Dynasty, the Lao Ri Sheng darning shop opened in Shanghai. It served the proliferation of tailors in the area, fixing scorch holes they accidentally made in fabrics. Business boomed.
“Darning is totally different from tailoring,” Xu says. “You can make a shirt but have no idea how to fix a hole in it.”
The high quality of “seamless darners” in Shanghai brought customers from far and wide, including Hong Kong and Japan — people who had valuable or sentimental clothing they wanted repaired.
In 1938, Xu’s father came to Shanghai from Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, becoming an apprentice in a dye and laundry house. He entered the darning industry at a time when he could learn the skill from masters of the art.
By 1949, he had built his reputation as one of the best darners in Shanghai. He was said to be able to repair anything, from a tweed jacket to a soft silk dress. He even worked wonders on leather.
Although the young Xu has developed her own reputation for quality darning, she says she doesn’t quite hold a candle to her father’s extraordinary skill.
“But I like what I’m doing,” she says. “When customers from across Shanghai come to pick up clothing restored to almost its original look, I smile and they smile.”
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