sarcio, sarcire (Latin): a patch (to patch up)
cerzir (Portuguese): a patch
surcir (Spanish): to modify
When we think about a history of repairs and alterations, almost immediately, a quirky dilemma appears: What is older, a suit or a patch? As trivial as it may seem, the dilemma posed is still significant. Unexpectedly, linguistics was the first to answer this seemingly historical question and ruled that the patch is actually older!
EVOLUTION OF CRAFTSMANSHIP
By following the language paths, we can somewhat trace the path of knowledge and its transmission. Knowledge transforms into skills, which we then use to obtain a profession, or in our case, a craft. Therefore, crafts inexorably travel, expand, and evolve. Crossing the boundaries of cultures and civilizations, each one has added more to the treasury of skill and craft than it has taken from it.
Thanks to the dedication and attention that craftsmen have given to their acquired skills, trades have not only crossed geographical boundaries but also temporal ones. Through the inheritance of skills and the transfer of knowledge from parents to children, the first family workshops were created. Over time, family workshops grew into companies, which with their success and importance, participated in the creation of what we know today as the market. In the Middle Ages, these circumstances led craftsmen to form craft associations, guilds, and clubs. Their task was to preserve the profession and improve business, both by maintaining existing markets and conquering new ones.
THE SUIT
As centuries pass, we also follow the Suit, which has been one of the main points of our dilemma since the beginning of the text. More precisely, we follow its creators – tailors, who rightfully gained the status of engineers of their profession by developing their skills. Like all engineers, tailors have mastered the alchemy of Creation. In the eyes of their clients, they transform flat and uniform fabric into impeccable suits and luxurious dresses seemingly with ease. Clients then use these garments to prove their created, inherited, or even invented status to the rest of the world and themselves.
You will say, nothing has changed until today.
And it hasn’t.
Our clients haven’t changed; therefore, to this day, the favorite form of nonverbal communication remains fashion. In other words, the clothes we use to present ourselves to the world around us. As tailors, we haven’t changed much. We are still both masters and slaves of Creation, absorbed in our own creations, which are, once again, more or less the same!
However, somewhat unexpectedly, the winner of the dilemma from the beginning of the history of repairs and alterations remains unchanged.
The Patch is still with us, both with the tailors and the clients. It emerged victorious in a grand style, without changing its purpose in the slightest.
FIXED, WORN, AND LOVED
Ask any tailor and they will tell you: “Yes, of course we do repairs.”
Of course, they’re making repairs because repairs are also a form of Creation. For some of us tailors, repairs, and alterations are a sublime skill of recreation that intimately symbolizes Rebirth. The challenge is even greater: to repair and breathe new life into the chosen piece of clothing!
Today, patching is an excellent go-to solution in the principles of sustainable development, which brings tangible results in the struggle for a cleaner planet. Clothes are repaired and altered, reborn and reused. Sometimes they are altered and given to someone else, and sometimes they are fixed, worn, and loved even more.
The Patch is a winner of the digital age as well. In the IT industry, every patch is eagerly awaited because there is no successful and sustainable project or product without a good quality patch. Codes are regularly patched and fixed, websites load quickly, and games don’t lag.
Let’s not be surprised if one morning an inspired programmer or gamer wakes up and asks:
“What came first? A Code or a Patch?”
IGOR RADULOVIĆ, Founder of REPPAREL Initiative
The author is a technical designer with decades of experience in product development in the apparel industry.