On Repairing, Not Replacing: Notes from a Cobbler in Maine

The boots were eight years old when I took them in. The leather was fine — better, in fact, than when I bought them — but the soles had finally given up, the way soles do, all at once and without warning, on a wet sidewalk in late October. I had assumed, in the back of my head, that this was the end of the boots. It turned out to be the beginning of a friendship with a man named Henry, who has run a cobbler shop in Portland, Maine, for thirty-one years.

Henry charged me ninety dollars to resole the boots and another forty to restitch a seam I hadn't noticed was failing. The boots, which had cost three hundred and fifty dollars new, will now last, by his estimate, another six to eight years. The math is not subtle. The cultural shift it implies — that we might, as a default, repair the things we own instead of replacing them — is a slower business.

There are fewer cobblers every year. Fewer tailors who will actually re-cut a garment, as opposed to hemming it. Fewer of the small, specialized people whose job it is to make the things you already own last longer. The reasons are familiar: cheap goods, expensive labor, the slow unbundling of skills that used to live on every main street.

What you notice, after a few years of taking things in to be fixed, is that the relationship to your own closet changes shape. You stop browsing. You start maintaining. The pieces you own acquire histories — this coat, that bag, the boots that Henry resoled twice. It is not a virtue, exactly. It is just a different way of being with your stuff. It is calmer, and over a decade, considerably cheaper, and the boots, as I write this, are by the door.