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Comment by damoonvisuals | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know where to buy their clothes ethically?

My girlfriend and I always try to buy resale if possible, but we still end up buying resale clothes which qualify as "fast fashion".

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I try to buy from Patagonia.

They were one of the first major brands to popularize the environmental impact of their clothing, especially cotton. They made a major push 25 years ago to educate consumers on the impacts of cotton, and switched to entirely organic cotton to help reduce those impacts.

They also helped create 1% For The Planet, were an early adopter of Bluesign, early adopters of recycled polyester for their clothing, and most recently have been promoting reselling and repairing used clothing.

I don't think its hyperbole to say that Patagonia was one of the very first companies that started the line of thinking you see in this QZ article.

On a personal note, most of my Patagonia clothing has been very durable. I have Patagonia stuff that is 20+ years old that I still use every year.

Patagonia is also known for its use of recycled bottles to make its polyester fleece jackets, which has expanded to many of its products.

Their warranty and repair program is fantastic as well. I brought in a shirt that I had worn the elbow out of and they first offered a replacement from one in the store. They didn't have the same pattern (the shirt is probably 5 or 6 years old), so they sent it in for repair for free.

A couple of years ago they sent out a repair-mobile. They not only repaired Patagonia gear, they repaired items regardless of brand. Pretty damn cool.

http://www.latimes.com/fashion/alltherage/la-ar-patagonia-la...

Sorry but let’s not forget the “fashion” in “fast fashion”.

Patagonia is the same cheap polyester crap made in Vietnam you get from Wal-Mart, with slightly tougher welds and reinforced seams. It's the bougie male equivalent of Lululemon. Carhartt is where it's at for quality durable outdoor clothing made in the US.

The Patagonia / Carhartt divide in the U.S. is essentially cultural. But when it comes to the environmental impact of their clothing, Patagonia objectively puts in more effort than Carhartt. It's one of the reasons (but not the only one) that Patagonia is more expensive than Carhartt.

Patagonia is great but obscenely expensive - a solution that does not scale at all.

$300 sweater jacket http://www.patagonia.com/product/mens-down-sweater-jacket/84...

Isn't that inflation adjusted pretty much a normal price for a down jacket 30 years ago? Something that you'd buy once every 3-4 years or so? At least that's how I'm still treating this. Also, I'm Swiss, so my sense of pricing may be off here. But winter shoes and winter jackets for us is something expensive that one doesn't buy often.

300$ USD is ~25% of a entry level workers monthly pay (net) in the US. Housing frequently hits between 50-30%, transportation another ~20%. Which means buy a 300$ anything means not eating that month for a large % of the US. Obviously Patagonia is still running which means there are enough people who can spare that but it's not universal (see the Sam Vimes Theory of Economic Inequality).

ETA: 300$ = 25% => 1200 a month net => 1500 gross (if no state taxes) => 9.38 an hour IF we assume the completely unrealistic 40/week

That sounds like a problem with depressed wages, not the price of the coat.

Welcome to the USA?

Absolutely, but my point is that the cost is reasonable, the wages are not, and that implies a fix. Moreover, the fix doesn’t lie with Patagonia. Even more, if the true cost of things like clothing weren’t extermslized brutally, Americans would be far more aware of the pressing need for said fix.

I certainly agree that 300$ USD should be completely reasonable for something that lasts half a decade, I'm just not sure how to get from here to there realistically (well in the 5-10 year short term).

I don't know how you can consider any $300 clothes reasonable. It doesn't cost a tenth of that to make and deliver.

>for something that lasts half a decade

Personally I made ~11000 USD last year: I consider $30 to be unaffordable, that's not the same as believing I should have to consider it unaffordable.

> It doesn't cost a tenth of that to make and deliver.

Well, not if you have a conscience about our ecosystem.

You ever sewn any? Some clothing is incredibly labour intensive.

Exactly. Again, I will use Switzerland as an example and give a few typical salaries:

Banker in Zurich with 10y experience: 12k USD/M

Engineer in Zurich with 0y experience: 8k USD/M

so far it probably sounds pretty normal for people used to SF / NY levels right?

Here's the difference:

Mc Donald's cashier in Zurich: ~3500 USD/M

Median Salary in Zurich: ~6000 USD/M

Median Salary across Switzerland: ~5600 USD/M

These give you the low and mid points of the salary spectrum. It's just much more compressed than in the US - this Patagonia jacket should be <10% of anyone's monthly salary, probably affordable for >90% of population. If it isn't, then it would be if you take social services into account that are designed to correct for such market mistakes that leave people behind in poverty.

And this is Switzerland, mind you, probably the most US-like libertarian and decentrally governed place in Europe. All of this would be affordable to Americans if your government wouldn't just pander to the big corporations and throw out money by the boatloads for insanely overpriced defence contracts.

>> most US-like libertarian and decentrally governed place in Europe.

Ah that's your problem the US economic model is punitive, not libertarian.

Switzerland is a small country benefitting from being the hub of a disproportional amount of global banking and commodity trading. I think that props up the minimum wage at McDonalds. That being said, the pride that the Swiss - from a McDonald’s worker to bus driver - show in their jobs is noticeable to this American.

Banking revenue is 7-9% of Swiss GDP, on par with many industrial nations. Commoditie Trades are disproportionate to Switzerland’s size for sure, but I fail to see how that translates to salaries in McDonalds - their main target market is hardly bankers and commodity traders. I think it has much more to do with the social safety net which imposes an implicit minimal wage (companies have to offer something significantly above what one can get from the government).

Which means buy a 300$ anything means not eating that month for a large % of the US.

Or, it means you have to save for more than a month to buy a jacket. Which, assuming it lasts a decent number of years, seems reasonable.

Assuming someone's income is that low, they can't just spend multiple months saving up for each and every article of clothing. That also means forgoing saving for anything else. What good is just a warm jacket when it is below 10F outside? Or when my car breaks down and I need to choose between that single jacket and a new alternator?

There is no long term if I can't survive the short term to get there. So in this situation, you buy the cheapest you can to ensure that you can at least make it to tomorrow.

How much have wages increased since then? I can imagine on average, people's purchasing power has decreased a lot since then. Mind you this is also due to rising fixed expenses - didn't have cable, internet, phone subscriptions back then either. And work was often closer to home, so less travel expenses.

They have web specials on their site, and a 50% off sale at least twice a year. Get on their mailing list and they'll tell you when it happens.

Pretty sure this is the same jacket, in an old color:

http://www.patagonia.com/product/mens-down-sweater-jacket/84...

But if they sold in larger volumes would the price go down with economies of scale? Maybe not as far as the cheapest stuff on the market but it could become attainable. or maybe parts of their approach could be used to build a cheaper line of clothing that is still environmentally responsible.

Yes and no. The costs of manufacturing may go down but it doesn't mean that it will be passed down to the consumers.

Generally speaking, selling cheaper is a bad business decision. It will increase costs and decrease earnings, you don't want to do that as a business. Prices should go up, not down.

In this specific case, we're talking about a niche brand appealing to an affluent audience. They milk their customers to give them good conscience. The price can't go down, that's against the business model.

I do agree. That's why see many companies like this https://aprl.la are coming up quickly in this space.

Zero info on that site. I'm looking for a jacket that lasts 5 years of consistent use that is not $300. Doesn't look like that site will provide it?

(Nothing against that brand because I don't know it but it looks like one of those shitty instagram ad brands)

5 years of consistent use, let's say that goes to ~180 days per year (no idea what your climate is) -> 900 days of wear. A $300 jacket would cost you 30 cents per day of usage then. Are you sure you do not spend a higher fraction of your money on ephemeral luxury like beverages or entertainment?

There's an article floating around from Patagonia that basically says: look we're trying as hard as anyone but frankly it's impossible.

you can at best pick your threshold but it is almost guaranteed that somewhere in the supply chain is something awful.

If that is true, I guess all the “sustainable clothing” brands are just achieving the impossible.

No, they're just choosing where they decide sustainable such that it doesn't strictly require every body in the supply chain earning at least (ppp adjusted) poverty wages.

I don't mean this as like a nihilistic "buy anything because it's all awful" sort of thing it's just that we live in an inescapably mutual world so there is basically no direct line or direct chain from the base inputs to the consumer outputs and somewhere in that tree is a leaf that is terrible. We can choose the best that we can but there is no perfect and its a stretch to even claim there's a good.

this is the how capitalism kills us all. we cannot be ethical and so every day we betray our ethics until we begin to betray them as a matter of course instead of a matter of necessity.

I don't get this from that vibe from this older interview - it sounds almost hopeful: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/24/patagon... And the current corporate statement says they are continually working to improve on this very topic. http://www.patagonia.com/corporate-responsibility-history.ht...

"continually working to improve" means "we haven't actually gotten there yet". And that's from one if the few companies that is actively trying.

Beware - some people think 'buying American' is a proxy for 'buying ethically', but that is not necessarily the case. Some brands are 'made in America' - but are made on nominally American territories in the Western pacific, where the workers are working in essentially sweatshop conditions. This article[1] is old but this charade is still going on last I checked.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/18/world/made-usa-hard-labor-...

You can buy your jeans from quality selvedge shops. There are many denim manufacturers to choose from that grow sustainable, organic cotton and weave/sew them in first-world countries that pay their workers livable wages. Obviously you'll pay more for these kinds of jeans – think in the range of $150 at the low end up to well past $500 for high end.

If you're into techier outerwear, you can look into the very popular Outlier (www.outlier.nyc) – again, you pay a premium but the textiles and sewing are made in socially responsible ways in socially responsible areas (I think).

I don't have a super comprehensive knowledge of fashion in this space though.

In the UK there's a startup called Birdsong [1] that's providing local, ethically sourced clothing.

They're still fairly small, but growing, and recently completed a successful crowdfunding campaign. They came through the same accelerator [2] as we did with Overleaf (then known as WriteLaTeX) back in 2013.

[1] https://birdsong.london

[2] https://bethnalgreenventures.com

If you are in Germany, this may be a sound option.

https://www.manomama.de

I make all my own clothes. While I still need to buy fabric, it's a great way to dress ethically.

You might even enjoy it. I do.

Do tell more!!

Edit: noted your site but more resources welcome too

Edit2: was on mobile, didn't notice docs, good site

I just walked by this place the other day. Haven't had a chance to look into how they're doing what they do, but it sounds like they could be what you're looking for: http://beawear.eu/

I recently heard about Everlane, but never tried them. They seem to be very transparent about their supply chain and their prices are totally ok.

I'm not an expert and haven't spend a lot of time researching them. Happy to hear more opinions/insights.

I had just heard about these guys too, and actually have been looking for stores like this. I'd like to switch out all my clothes that wear out fast with responsibly sourced, quality clothing. Hopefully this one will deliver.

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