Why Levi’s is teaching high schoolers how to mend their clothes

Amanda Lee McCarty, sustainability consultant and host of the Clotheshorse podcast, remembers fixing a tear on her Forever 21 shirt with a stapler—just long enough to get through the workday before tossing it out.

In the early 2000s, when fast-fashion brands began flooding the market, clothing became so cheap that shoppers could endlessly refresh their wardrobes. The garments were poorly made and tore easily, but it hardly mattered. They were designed to be disposable, encouraging repeat purchases.

“It didn’t seem worth the time and effort to repair the top,” she recalls. “And besides, I didn’t have any mending skills at the time.”

McCarty isn’t alone. Starting in the early 1900s, schools trained students—mostly girls—in the art of sewing and mending clothes in home economics classes. Students learned how to operate sewing machines to create tidy hemlines and sew buttons by hand. But by the 1970s, partly due to the feminist critique that home economics classes reinforced traditional gender roles, these courses slowly began getting cut from public schools.

There are now several generations of Americans with no sewing skills at all. In a recent study conducted by Levi’s, 41% of Gen Zers report having no basic repair knowledge, such as fixing a tear or sewing on a button—which is double the rate of older generations.

This also coincided with clothes getting cheaper, thanks to a global supply chain and low-wage labor in developing countries. Suddenly, clothes were so inexpensive that even the poorest families could buy them instead of making them. Eventually, as McCarty illustrates, they were so cheap that there was no point in even mending them.

Today, the average American throws away 81.5 pounds of clothing every year, resulting in 2,100 pounds of textile waste entering U.S. landfills every second. This transformation of the fashion industry has led directly to the environmental disaster we now find ourselves in: Manufacturing billions of clothes annually accelerates climate change, and discarded clothes now clog up landfills, deserts, and oceans.

Levi’s believes that one step in tackling the crisis is to teach Gen Z how to mend. The denim brand, which generates upward of $6 billion a year, has partnered with Discovery Education to create a curriculum aligned with educational standards that teaches high schoolers how to sew a button, mend a hole or tear, and hem trousers. This curriculum, which launches today, is available for free and will be shared with teachers across the country who can incorporate it into a wide range of courses—from STEM to civics to social studies.

“Needle-and-Thread Evangelism”

The idea took hold during a poker night. Paul Dillinger, Levi’s head of global product innovation, noticed that a button had popped off a friend’s Oxford shirt. “Oliver said he didn’t have time to throw it away and put on a new shirt,” Dillinger recalls. “It was an illustration of everything that’s wrong with the current paradigm. And it could be fixed with a little needle-and-thread evangelism.”

Dillinger, who trained as a fashion designer and is a skilled garment maker, spent 20 minutes teaching the group—men in their mid-twenties—how to sew the button back on. Since then, he’s made a habit of preaching the gospel of mending with everyone in his orbit, including his colleagues at Levi’s.

One of them was Alexis Bechtol, Levi’s director of community affairs. She saw an opportunity for the company to scale that education beyond informal demos. Bechtol helped spearhead the Wear Longer program and the partnership with Discovery Education, which specializes in developing age-appropriate lesson plans aligned with state and federal standards.

Levi’s and Discovery Education worked together to create a curriculum that teaches students the foundations of mending a garment by hand without a sewing machine. There are four lesson plans that are each designed to take up a single classroom period and are flexible enough to be incorporated into courses across disciplines.

Kimberly Wright, an instructional design manager at Discovery Education who worked on the curriculum, says the lessons aren’t positioned as a revival of home economics. Instead, they’re framed as practical, transferable skills relevant to a wide range of careers. “We’re seeing a resurgence in skills-based learning,” Wright says. “Across the country, there’s a shift toward not just making students college-ready, but career-ready.”

The initiative is funded through Levi’s social impact and community engagement budget rather than its marketing arm, although the curriculum will be branded with the Levi’s logo. Dillinger believes that it is valuable for Levi’s to be associated with mending, because it emphasizes that its products are designed to be durable and long-lasting.

“Levi’s wants to be the most loved item in your closet, the thing you wear most often,” he says. “If we empower our customers to sustain this old friend in their closet, it creates brand affinity.”

A Small Fix for a Larger Systemic Problem

At its core, the curriculum aims to challenge Gen Z’s perception of clothing as disposable. In theory, mending keeps garments out of landfills. “It’s about extending the life cycle of your product so you don’t have to buy something new,” Bechtol says.

Gen Z is coming of age in a world dominated by ultra-fast-fashion players like Shein, where clothes are cheaper than ever. Mending is no longer an economic necessity—and in some cases, it can cost more in time and money than a garment is worth. Levi’s is trying to reframe mending as something else: a creative act that allows wearers to personalize their clothes. Over time, Dillinger says that personal investment changes how people value what they own.

“Once you’ve invested time and care into repairing a garment, it shifts the value equation,” he says. “It becomes more like a plant or a pet—something you’re responsible for sustaining.”

There’s no doubt that mending is a crucial part of the sustainable fashion movement. McCarty, who once stapled her shirt, now repairs her clothing to extend its life. But she points out that the fashion industry’s bigger problem is flooding the market with cheap clothes and encouraging constant consumption.

While individuals can buy less and wear clothes longer, she says brands must take responsibility for producing fewer, more durable products. “It’s sort of like putting a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound and calling it fixed, when there are larger issues to deal with,” she says.

McCarty extends this critique to Levi’s itself. While some Levi’s products are durable, she notes that the company also produces large volumes of lower-end jeans for retailers like Target and Kohl’s. These garments are often made with synthetic fabrics that are harder to repair and won’t biodegrade. “Levi’s is selling far more volume in lower-end jeans than they do in premium,” she says. “Some of these products are just not repairable.”

Still, McCarty believes the Wear Longer program could meaningfully educate Gen Z—not only about mending, but also about the broader consequences of overproduction. Dillinger agrees. “Once you become a participant in the life of the garment, it becomes harder to ignore the broader industrial reality of how clothes are made,” he says. “You’re not participating in a similar set of tasks to the people who made the clothes.”

Ultimately, Dillinger sees mending as a form of empowerment. Teaching young people how to repair their clothes gives them agency—to extend what they own and to engage with fashion more critically.

“The sooner we respect kids as emerging adults with agency, the sooner they can make more responsible decisions for themselves,” he says.