[jabl]

Yes. But really, it was much worse in many ways. A 100 years ago, say, the people doing clothes repair for a living were desperately poor, and often being single women they often had to resort to prostitution to feed themselves as the income from repairing clothes simply wasn't enough.

I do think that from an environmental standpoint we should repair and recycle clothes a lot more than we do, but lets not romanticize the past. The small clothes repair businesses disappeared for a reason as living standards improved. Furthermore, today factory production of clothes is incredibly efficient and tends to be done in low-income countries, further making it even harder to restart some kind of clothes repair industry in high-income countries.