By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photographed by Hannah Hoggatt
From our September 2022 issue
The mysterious provenance of used things has always fascinated Jared DeSimio. He began his creative career in 2004 as a photographer with an eye for humanity’s mundane wake: a hiking trail trampled by long-gone boots, the disarray of a picked-over store shelf. His focus shifted to making clothing and accessories in 2008, when, unable to afford a stylish upcycled messenger bag, he upcycled one himself, out of faded nylon from a Salvation Army frame pack. DeSimio had never sewn before, but he liked the bag so much he spent the next few years improving his technique — along the way breaking his wife’s sewing machine and slogging through an ill-conceived contract to make tote bags for a Japanese distributor. (“I can’t make multiples of the same thing,” he says. “It burns me out.”)
By 2013, DeSimio had accumulated a whole line’s worth of one-of-a-kind clothes, hats, shoes, and bags, all made from thrift-store finds. Formerly a Mount Ararat High School ed-tech, he opened a boutique — Jared DeSimio: Made, Modified, Curated — in Brunswick last fall. In the shop, he displays racks of modified and mended button-ups, T-shirts, hats, and totes. On one wall hangs a tattered pair of jeans that DeSimio wore for 500 days without washing. He’s a deep thinker when it comes to not doing laundry: the wear patterns tell a story, he says, about mortality, endurance, and people’s lived experience. So do the ones on the vintage L.L.Bean bag he modified with Wiscasset and Lewiston high-school patches and an embroidered pennant that reads “Jim.” Or on the frayed-to-transparency Carhartts he brought back from the dead, over and over, with patches of mattress ticking and canvas apron. DeSimio also teaches others to rehab old clothes at the monthly mending nights he hosts in his shop. In true Mainer form, he believes it’s empowering — and cost-effective — for people to fix up their own clothes.
A sun-bleached T-shirt DeSimio bought at Unity’s Common Ground Country Fair inspired his Shed Collection. He takes used T-shirts, pants, jackets, and more — he prefers vintage, quality brands from low-cost thrift stores like Salvation Army — dunks them in water, twists and folds them into little bundles (like with tie-dye), and lays them on the roof of his shed, leaving them to be battered by the elements. The end result leaves the clothes texturized and bleached by the sun in unpredictable patterns. “It’s a collaboration between me and nature,” he says. “It’s been drilled into our heads that fashion is about being clean and new. I like to take something that is not that and revitalize it. Have it become fresh and new again — while also highlighting the fact that it is not.”
DeSimio’s shop is only open Fridays and by appointment or chance. Mending workshops ($39) are held monthly, and tickets can be purchased online. 14 Pleasant St., Brunswick.
