From my mending pile, a pair of Ingrid’s jeans, with a broken zipper. The jeans themselves are still in good shape, but with a missing tooth, the zipper isn’t usable.

Annoyingly, I won’t be able to fix it. The zipper is attached to a placket of fabric that has been sewed to the rest of the trousers with a serger, and I can’t get at the zipper without ripping that serged seam. The other half of the zipper is likewise blocked in by a double-needle seam, which I’d need to rip. The ripping is doable, but reattaching everything in a decently tidy way would be really hard. I would almost be reconstructing the whole fly from scratch, without the special machines that were used for the original.

There’s a new EU law enforcing consumers’ right to repair, applying to electronics and household goods. I do wish there was something similar for clothing. Maybe in another decade or two.