Maintenance as resisting consumerism: Sustenance Series

And feeling like a cool museum curator while you're at it

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of The Bell!

I’m in the midst of a 12-day yoga challenge right now. In the first class, the instructor pulled a tarot card that was “The Sustainer.” While discussing what it meant, she drew the distinction between sustenance and maintenance. There’s a fine but important line:

• What maintains you keeps you at status quo. It keeps you from falling into disrepair, it keeps you running, it preserves you.

• What sustains you lifts you up. It buoys you, it gives you life. It nourishes you.

You go to the dentist for maintenance. You eat a beautiful meal for sustenance.

We’re going to explore both in this series of articles, but I ultimately decided to call it ‘the sustenance series’ rather than ‘the maintenance series.’ The way I think about it, all maintenance is sustenance, but not all sustenance is maintenance. If that makes sense. Sustenance is the bigger umbrella.

Okay. Semantics box checked.

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Today we actually are talking about maintenance. Specifically: taking good care of your stuff so you don’t need to buy more of it.

My mom is the queen of this. She stores, cleans, and packs her wardrobe such that she still has pieces from the 80s in near-perfect condition. (The discipline to fold everything with tissue paper is truly aspirational.) Same with her car; when she sold an over 10-year-old car a few years back, it looked (and ran) like new.

But I feel like wearing something you’ve had for years, or even decades, is the ultimate luxury in the fast fashion economy. And it removes a layer of stress and a layer of time and financial expenditure: you’re not filling the same hole in your wardrobe year after year. Idk about you, but I don’t really like to spend my time shopping.

And if a chocolate stain does land on your beloved khaki trench coat, or a moth nibbles your cashmere sweater, clothes at a certain level of quality usually can be cleaned and repaired.

The trouble is with most other consumer goods that aren’t made to be fixed, because the manufacturers hope you will just throw it away and buy a new one. See my anecdote about my dad and his leaf blower. And think about how many iPhones you’ve owned since 2007.

And shoes. Why are shoes so disposable?? I guess, because most of us are walking most of our miles in sneakers, myself included. You can’t exactly re-sole a sneaker.

There’s a term for this: planned obsolescence.

Planned obsolescence: the concept of policies planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain pre-determined period of time upon which it decreases in function or suddenly ceases to function, or might be perceived as unfashionable. Thank you Wikipedia.

Obviously, planned obsolescence is good for companies and investors but bad for consumers because it forces, well, consumption.

As a side note, is it just me who gets the ick when anyone talks about “American consumers doing this and wanting that”? I don’t know anyone who primarily identifies as a consumer. But that’s the way the people selling things view us.

Anyway.

Here’s how to dodge planned obsolescence in a few areas of life (I don’t have a solution for technology; lmk if you do).

Buy something maintain-able in the first place

Buy something that will wear well, wash well, patina well, and hold up to many uses over time.

A good rule is to choose natural materials. No poly in the fabrics. Down-filled pillows, furniture, and duvets. Wooden tables and chairs. Marble countertops if you can afford them. As little plastic as possible. As little plywood as possible.

And as they say: buy once, cry once. Price tag doesn’t necessarily equal quality, but quality often comes with a higher price tag.

I find that the best-made, most repairable items come from small businesses, no surprise there.

E.M Reitz is a beautiful shirting brand that’s produced in New York’s garment district.

Thierry Colson is an expressive, feminine womenswear brand where everything is made in France, with some Indian block printing and Italian fabrics.

Loretta Caponi is a linen and clothing brand featuring hand embroidery in their Florence, Italy atelier.

Thos. Moser is a handmade American furniture brand based in Maine.

And of course, developing an eye for quality and buying secondhand is the number one most sustainable and maintainable way to shop. If that piece has lasted long enough to be in one person’s hands for many years—even generations—it’s likely to last for many more in yours.

Care for what you own

There’s definitely a learning curve here and I’m very much on it, so rather than doling out my own advice, I’ll turn to the experts:

The Butler’s Closet is an incredible resource for both products to protect your fine possessions and how-tos on their blog. They sell products to care for your wardrobe, furniture, jewelry, shoes, linens, and laundry, both at home and while you travel.

The advice on their blog includes how to care for your shoes, how to use a clothes brush and cut back on dry cleaning, and even how to protect upholstered furniture from sun damage. And much, much more.

Sarah at Fewer and Better Blog writes about clothing care here, and sweater-specific care here.

And for the gentlemen among us, my husband is a big fan of Kirby Allison, who set out to make the perfect suit hanger and branched out into all kinds of hangers, shoe care, garment care, and published guides on taking care of those items.

I find it so empowering to have this knowledge, and caring for my stuff kind of makes me feel like a museum curator. (Not that any of my stuff is museum quality, but it’s nice to treat it like it is). After all, a curator is someone who cares for a collection; a custodian. We are the custodian of everything we own!

Live with the less-than-perfect thing for longer than you want to

This is a tale of four bentwood chairs.

Sometime in my mom’s early adulthood, her mom was driving by the University of Nebraska campus and saw an academic building being emptied of furniture. She pulled over and asked what the plan was for the furniture, and the plan was to throw it away. Without hesitation, she loaded up four bentwood chairs into her station wagon and handed them off to my mom for her first apartment.

When she got married, my mom brought the chairs to the first house she shared with my dad, then the second. They remained there around our farmhouse table in the lower level until I left home and moved into my first apartment, then moved with me several times until they landed around my dining table in Boston.

Right at home.

Trust me; my parents wanted to get better chairs for their lower level dining table many years before I left home. But instead of running out and buying the chairs they really wanted, sending these chairs to the trash for which they were originally headed, they just lived with them. It wasn’t ideal, but it was fine. And eventually, a window opened for them to have another life with me!

*Strong disclaimer that using something less than ideal until you can one day hand it down, give it away, or sell it is different from hoarding!!

We see so many total home redecorations on social media and in magazines that it has started to feel normal. I’ve long been baffled by stories in Architectural Digest where every corner of a house is custom-designed and practically nothing is imported from the (usually celebrity) client’s previous residence. I’ve always thought, “Really? You couldn’t find a place for anything in your old house? And if that’s the case, what did you do with all that stuff?”

That makes me think… LA must have some incredible estate sales; let me know if I need to schedule a trip.

Anyway, this is not normal. Starting with a clean slate when you move house is totally bizarre, wasteful, and also really sad in my opinion. Even if you do have the budget to start fresh, am I the only one who’s super sentimental about their stuff? I drive an 11-year-old car and sometimes driving around town, I tear up thinking of what’s going to happen to it when the time comes to upgrade. Maybe that’s not totally normal, but you get my point.

Just try to separate me from the sturdy chest of drawers handed down from my aunt, or my beautiful Herend porcelain dishes that I got as wedding gifts.

But it’s just a sign of the times. Furniture these days—for the price, size, packaging, and shipping involved—is shockingly disposable. And the trend cycle has been sped up by companies like West Elm and Crate & Barrel almost to the pace of fashion, such that their catalogues convince you that Art Deco is in one year and Coastal is in the next.

I don’t know about you, but there’s not enough time in life for the shape of my coffee table to go out of style. We have other things to do!

And back to my point about buying something that’s maintainable in the first place, most upholstered furniture from those companies isn’t something you could take to an upholsterer and re-cover if you tire of the pattern. It’s just not built in a way to make that possible.

Learn to tinker or find a good handyman

Stupidly, I placed a houseplant on the seat of one of the famous bentwood chairs and the water overflowed, damaging the wooden seat. It finally cracked when my husband sat on it the other week (hilarious, if alarming for him) and a handyman came by yesterday afternoon to take a look. He’s going to repair it for us, and I’m excited to put it back into use.

:(

The chairs will live to fight another day! I hope to one day pass them on to one of my children for their first apartment, along with the story of their thrifty great-grandma seeing usefulness and potential in something somebody else was throwing away.

When you’re purchasing mechanical things, it might pay off to buy refurbished old (like a KitchenAid mixer or a vacuum, for example) rather than new. That way, if something breaks, you can fix it if you have the tinkering skills.

Older models of things are often built to a higher standard of quality and break less often, though finding certain repair parts can be tricky.

Like furniture that’s impossible to reupholster, many things are manufactured with tamper-proof hardware or in another way that’s impossible to repair. The Right to Repair debate is a very pressing one right now, where citizens are organizing to demand that companies sell things that can be repaired, not just thrown out and replaced. Learn more at Repair.org!

Researching this, I just learned, with much pride, that in 2013 Massachusetts passed the first-of-its-kind Motor Vehicle Owner’s Right to Repair Act, which required vehicle manufacturers to provide information to allow anyone to repair their vehicles. As of 2018, auto manufacturers abide by this MA law in all 50 states.

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The trade-off to all this maintenance is, of course, convenience. And it’s a fair trade-off to make. You are your own best judge of how much maintenance you can take on in your own life. I, for one, do not want to learn how to tinker on a vintage car or spend my days doing so. But some people take pleasure in that and the inconvenience is worth it.

But like with all things sustainability, choose a few areas that work for you and don’t drive yourself crazy trying to be perfect.

Let me know your thoughts and tips on maintenance in the comments!

I’ll leave you with the old motto from the time of rations during WWII:

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without!”

The earth, your wallet, and many, many small business owners will thank you.

xx Jane