Someone Else | After the Fades: Matt Rho and Boro Denim Repair

1. The Present
2. The Past
3. The Future

The Present

Matt Rho worked in venture capital before becoming a partner at Shockoe Atelier a few years ago. Matt left Shockoe in the summer of 2017, but continues to work in, and with, denim. I recently caught up with Matt on the phone. He talked about his love for boro denim repair, how he intends to turn that love into a business, and why everyone should mend their own jeans.

Joe Jarvis
What's the difference between sashiko and boro?

Matt Rho
Sashiko is the stitch that's used in boro repair, but also in a lot of other things too. Sashiko just refers to a very simple running stitch. It's been used in a lot of different cultures and sewing traditions. It's as simple as a stitch can possibly get. It was used in boro mending. Since then it's been developed further to become an embroidery stitch. People started using sashiko to create a lot of intricate patterns and designs. When people talk about sashiko, they talk about embroidery, which is about creating designs on fabric. With boro mending, at least the kind that I do and that I see in traditional boro mending, you're not trying to create a design on the fabric. You're trying to mend a hole.

Joe
There can be patterns in boro, though. Isn't that a kind of design?

Matt
Patterns emerge from the damage. When I was first starting out, on a couple of occasions I would do some kind of embellishment. Like, on my jeans there's a patch with rays coming out of it. But as I studied vintage boro pieces I just never saw that. I started thinking, "This is not a mode of self-expression." The real work of this is not imposing yourself on the repair. That creates space for the garment and the fabric and the repair to evolve on their own, without some kind of preconceived notion of what it should look like. That's important because the more we impose our own ideas on the mending, the more sort of contrived it's going to look.

The real beauty of true vintage boro is that this aesthetic emerges that is completely organic, completely natural, and not intentionally designed in any way. There is sort of a chaos to it that ultimately results in this look that feels very inevitable. There's no pretense to it. The way I think about it: It's unaware of itself. When you start doing designs, there's a real artists intentionality or mender's intentionality, a kind of self-awareness that really limits what it can be. It doesn't leave space for these amazing natural surprises to happen.

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Joe

Matt

Joe

Matt

Right, exactly. There's a guy, Yanagi Sōetsu, who was the founder of the Japanese folk craft movement. He wrote a lot about the pottery that's used in Japanese tea ceremonies. Tea ceremonies became this very elevated fine-art form, but the early tea-ceremony masters would always gravitate towards very rustic Korean pottery. This pottery was peasant rice bowls. None of these things were meant to be beautiful. They were never meant to be anything special. They were just meant to be very functional. Over time they developed patina and scars and cracks, and those cracks would be mended. They developed a kind of humble nobility―for a lack of a better word, a soul, a personality.

It was never the intention of the maker for things to look this way. Really, it took someone from the outside, a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk, to see and understand the beauty of it. The Koreans always laughed at the Japanese, like, “These are our rice bowls. These super educated hoity-toity Japanese tea-ceremony monks are coming down and buying these things for crazy uses.” Yanagi writes about this in his book Unknown Craftsman, which is a collection of his essays. He basically says that the beauty of these tea bowls is precisely in the lack of intentionality. These are objects that are completely unaware of themselves. Because of that lack of self-awareness, there's a complete lack of pretension. That's the same kind of approach to aesthetics that people find in boro. This amazing beauty emerges from a lack of awareness of itself.

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Joe

Matt

The Past

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Joe Jarvis
When did you start getting into boro?

Matt Rho
When I was at Shockoe, we started doing a lot of research and reading about indigo dyeing traditions. Japan, China, India, Pakistan―those are the big indigo traditions. As I did more reading about Japanese indigo dyeing, the older pieces that would pop up were these boro pieces. I was blown away by the intricacy and how simple they were. That whole aesthetic blew me away. It's a little bit trite, but it's the beauty of imperfection. I was really fascinated by that.

I kept doing research on boro pieces and started talking to people who currently deal in boro. At the same time, we were getting repairs for Shockoe jeans. I just thought, "Well, wouldn't it be cool to mend some of these jeans using boro techniques?" I took a pair of jeans that I was wearing, the Shockoe originals, and just started mending some of the holes. Wearing the jeans, you develop an awareness for what works, what doesn't, and how to do it. I got really strong reactions from people. Some people really liked my jeans, and some people didn't. Then people started asking if I would do their jeans, and at the time, I was like, “Yeah, for sure, no problem.”

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The Future

Joe Jarvis

Matt Rho

Initially I thought, "Well, maybe I'll take in repairs and people will pay me for the repairs." Then I realized that, number one, the repairs take way too long to be viable as a business and, number two, because of the amount of time they take, the repairs are really expensive. These days I only take in repairs that I’m particularly interested in doing. That type of custom work is a little bit of a studio activity, experimentation.

I’m trying to encourage people to do their own repairs. The repairs are super easy to do. You don’t need any training. You just need time, and they are very time intensive. I’ve decided that I’m going to try to set up this business where it's more about teaching and equipping people with supplies and how-tos, so they can do this work themselves on their own jeans. There's no reason why anybody who is into raw denim shouldn't know how to do this on their own clothing.

Joe

Matt

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Matt is still working on the new business. For now, check out his Medium post on getting started with boro repairs.

All photos of Matt and his workspace were taken by Jaclyn Brown. All photos of repaired denim were taken by Matt and used here with his permission. You can see more of Matt's boro repairs on Instagram.

1.Stories

After the Fades: Matt Rho and Boro Denim Repair

The Present

The Past

The Future

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