Mended - The Story of a Dress and the People Who Made It

A vibrant picture book that follows a favorite dress from cotton field to factory and inspires kids to love, value, and mend their clothes instead of chasing fast fashion.

There’s a hole in Lucy’s favorite dress—but she refuses to toss it and buy a new one. Instead, she heads next door to Mrs. Garcia, a talented seamstress, and together they mend. As the sewing machine whirs under Mrs. Garcia's neat stitches, they talk about the incredible journey the dress has taken around the world.

Indian farmers planted and picked the cotton. Truck drivers hauled heavy bales to the city. Weavers spun fibers into yarn that sailed across the ocean on a huge container ship to China, where workers transformed it into cloth and dyed it every color imaginable, until a seamstress in LA's Fashion District finally cut and stitched it into the dress Lucy loves.

With Kay Sohini’s elegant, detail-rich art, journalist Elizabeth Segran shines a spotlight on the millions of workers who make our clothes—and shows young readers why mending, re-wearing, and thoughtful consuming matter.