The Ledger

This city lost its clothing trade, and it went dark.

The mills shut. The dye works emptied into the beck. The containers kept arriving and stopped leaving.

You send a shirt you already own to someone who will want it. They use it to mend part of the city. Nothing is bought and nothing is thrown away. What everyone has mended so far is below.

What the trade left behind

The Fashion DistrictShopfronts dark, dummies still dressed in last season. The shops closed faster than the people could leave.
The Shipping ContainersCranes stopped mid-lift. Some of those boxes have never been opened, and some were never meant to be.
The Sewer UnderworldThe water still runs the colour of whatever was dyed that week. People live down here anyway; the post gets through.
The WastelandThe road in. What could not be sold was buried here, and it has not rotted yet.

The city is invented. The reasons are not: roughly a hundred billion garments are made each year, and most are worn a handful of times before they are thrown away.

Why this is worth doing together

A hundred billion garments are made every year. Most are worn a few times. One person refusing that changes nothing worth measuring; a few thousand people doing it together is a different arithmetic, and it is the only kind that has ever worked.

The Patchwork does not ask you to buy anything. It asks you to move a shirt you already own to someone who will want it, and to use what arrives to repair part of a city that was broken by the same trade. Nothing is manufactured. Nothing is thrown away. The only thing that grows is the number below.

What the Patchers have mended

Everyone is stitching the same cloth. These are the totals, for all of us together.

Counting…

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