Fashion Fixes on the Fly: Rubber Bands, Safety Pins, and Nail Polish

Let's talk fashion disasters.

I'm not talking about something that would pop up on Go Fug Yourself or a Worst Dressed List. I'm talking "zipper busted, run in tights, walked out of the house without a belt on and now my pants are gradually falling off" disasters. You know, the kind of thing that always happens to me, and while I'm fretting about it, NO ONE ELSE HAS NOTICED.

And let's face it, I don't carry around a sewing kit in my bag. I just don't. I don't even have safety pins on a regular basis. (I should fix this.)

So, just for fun, here are a few of the fixes I've done with what I've had handy.

- The too-cold cardigan. This past weekend, I was walking around with a deep-V cardigan that left my chest really cold, and my mind was racing as to what I could use to hold it shut -- sticks? rubber bands? How about that pink balloon I found randomly on the street; could I let the air out of the balloon and use that to tie the top closed? (The balloon was dirty, so I didn't do it. BUT I THOUGHT ABOUT IT.) Later I found a safety pin at my boyfriend's and used that to pin it closed, but I was digging in my purse and found that I did have a badge-style pin AND a hair tie in there, both of which would have worked.

- The loose button. I have that lovely Brooklyn Industries trench coat, which has a loose button. Instead of pulling it off and resewing it, I dabbed some Russian Navy (I know, blasphemy, right?) nail polish on the thread in hopes of securing it a little better. I think I still need to resew it, though. But as a quick fix, nail polish (either colored or clear) is a good thing to have a lot of when something's unravelling, whether it's a ribbon or your tights or what have you.

- The belt substitutes. All of my belts are from thrift or resale stores because I never really go out shopping for belts -- it's more of a DESPERATE NEED FOR BELT that drives me to get a new belt. I have pants that will be fine on Day 1 of wearing, but around day 2 they start to mosey their way on down. So while I now have a nice little batch of belts, there have been times that I've had to improvise. Here are some of the things I've tried and used:
- a chain of paper clips (didn't work)
- a chain of rubber bands (sort of worked? but they would sometimes fling off)
- satin ribbon (worked)
- telephone cord (also worked -- the plug-in-to-the-wall cord, not the curly receiver-to-set cord)

- The busted zipper. In high school, I had a pair of jeans where the zipper pull fell off and the zipper wouldn't stay up. So I looped a safety pin into the fly, zipped it up, and then had to pin it to the front flap of the fly because it would still slip down if I didn't pin it. Somehow I had a decorative safety pin with beads on it (probably from some crafty experiment), so that became my zipper pull.

So what have been your nearly-avoided disasters, and how did you fix them? What's in your emergency kit -- or what would be in your kit if you actually had one?