In San Francisco, fashion students from City College of San Francisco’s Fashion Design and Merchandising program spent a day at our Levi’s® Market Street store’s Tailor Shop learning how to mend, embroider, hem and customize hardware. In New York, public school kids in the city’s Garment District are learning to sew in a new after-school program. In Brussels, LS&Co. employees meet regularly to teach each other how to repair, alter and care for their garments so they can pass that knowledge on to others.
Those are just some recent examples of the Levi’s® Wear Longer Project in action.
The Wear Longer Project launched in January as a community initiative centered on a simple idea: once you learn how to sew a button, mend a tear or apply a patch, you can teach those skills to someone else. The free online curriculum developed in partnership with Discovery Education is designed to do just that, bringing hands-on repair education to schools, community spaces and LS&Co. workplaces so that more people can have the confidence to repair, reimagine and extend the life of their clothes.
Nine months later, the project has reached nearly 90,000 students across the U.S. and is expanding to Europe in October. What began as an online curriculum has now expanded into classrooms, community spaces and workplaces thanks to the growing network of educators and partners who are teaching practical repair skills to the next generation. LS&Co. employees, like those in Brussels, are also increasingly becoming ambassadors of the Wear Longer Project, sharing their own skills and bringing the curriculum into their communities.
Here’s how the Levi’s® Wear Longer Project has been growing since its launch and how repair skills are being shared between colleagues, students and communities:
From the Lab to the Classroom to Sustained Local Programs
The Wear Longer Project’s first in-person workshop was at Levi Strauss & Co.’s Eureka Innovation Lab in San Francisco, where more than 50 high school students spent a day learning how to patch, hem, mend and customize. From there, the project brought community workshops to more Bay Area locations for the Big Game at Levi’s® Stadium in February and later to Miami, introducing its curriculum to new audiences.
A key part of the project is that its resources are available free of charge to educators and students everywhere. Community partners like the Youth Art Exchange in San Francisco and the Miami Music Project have been extending the curriculum into local schools and community spaces, giving students more opportunities to learn from and practice alongside educators and organizations.
In mid-September, LS&Co. kicked off a partnership with The New York Sewing Center to bring a Wear Longer workshop to young people in the city’s Garment District. The workshop also launched a new five-week after-school program, taught by The New York Sewing Center, that will provide New York City public school students with free sewing instruction, the Wear Longer Project curriculum, sewing machines and supplies.
“There’s a moment when someone patches their first hole or sews on their first button, and you can see it click that they don’t have to throw something away just because it’s broken. That’s what the Wear Longer Project is about,” said Alexis Bechtol, director of Community Affairs at LS&Co. “Every new partner and employee who gets involved means more young people get to have that moment, and that’s what makes this growth so exciting.”
Learn more about the Levi’s® Wear Longer Project on our website.
