A tunic is two weeks' earnings. Let's say you make $36,000 a year; two weeks' earnings for you is $1500.
The invention of mill-powered looms began the Industrial Revolution, completely upending the economies of Europe.
The reality is that the loom, for as amazing as it is, is only a small piece of why that item costs so little.
Tunic, possibly wool or linen. Both of these items still come at a massive premium today when compared to a cotton or a synthetic. We have made changes and massive progress in the production of the base materials.
We have transport issues, it is unlikely that your typical tunic was an imported good. It was probably made and sourced much more locally. Today, due to the nature of production and the structure of tax and tariffs on garments it is likely that your t-shirt is fairly well traveled, with it crossing the ocean more than once (cotton to Asia, woven in one place, made into a garment in another, possibly printed on in a third before even making it to you).
There is a LOT more to the story, sewing machines, zippers (YKK is a fascinating company), elastic, pattern making, fabric cutting. The boxes that your products are shipped in, cardboard and steel, the packaging plastic - the inks for it. Dye is a whole field of science and research that has made so much progress in the last 50 years never mind going as far back as a "tunic".
The point is there is a massive iceberg under that loom, one you barely see or think about.
The miracle of textiles is an artifact of the past. In order to make the insane supply chain make sense, the product is cheapened to the minimum viable level. Most of what happens today is financial engineering.
My old ring-spun champion sweatshirts from the 80s:90s are a much better and cheaper product than most stuff on the market today. All made (farmed, spun and sewn) by US labor in South Carolina or New York.
You can still find high quality fabrics that have been turned into garments but it is rare and costly. I, as someone who is tall, am mostly locked out of these markets. Interestingly however I am more often then not forced to buy more expensive and better formal items (suits in particular).
Granted, you can also buy very cheap quality shirts at Wal-Mart for around that price, but those won't survive much longer than a year with regular wear and washes.
Tbh, if you get from a decent supplier then the quality is usually fine. I am not sure why there is a stigma around non-US products. A lot of third-world countries have very skilled labour. And most of the "US-branded" t-shirts today are of very variable quality...but that is the only product these days for certainty that your clothes weren't made by a child.
I have not found price to have much basis on the lifetime of a tshirt. The design/mass production of the design seems to be most of the cost. You can buy a high quality tshirt for very cheap its just the same design has been sold 500,000 times already.
The price was $6.72 per shirt and the same pack is currently on sale for $4.27 per shirt.
Based on previous experience, I expect them to last around 100-120 washes. Worn every other week, this translates to 4-5 years.
But I don't think this is primarily the cost of the wool: Contrast this with shirts, where I can buy a really nice modern wool blend shirt for about a day or maybe day and a half of minimum wage, one that has all the moisture management and skin feel properties of wool but that holds up in the dryer pretty okay. I mean, I guess the same company makes some nice tights which make great undergarments for a Californian visiting a place that snows, so the problem is actually, I guess, that I'm unwilling to go out in public in tights without pants over them, and I live in a place where pants over tights is just too warm.
https://go-armynavy.com/military-surplus/collectibles/austra...
(I'm not vouching for that vendor, but I'm pretty sure that's what I've got. I got mine from ebay)
Boiled wool blankets are also great. Very warm. And very durable. Much like felt.
The transition point came in the 1950s and 1960s with the mass-marketing of synthetic fabrics and outdoor-wear, principally rip-stop nylon. Even then, a natural product, goose down, remained the preferred insulating material in parkas.
Until the 1880s, the only clothing materials that existed were cotton, linen, a few other plant fibres (jute, woven grass), wool, leather, silk, furs, and (generally for military use) metal.
In the 1880s, the first synthetics appeared: viscose rayon and cellulose (generally only used in collars and cuffs). In the decade of the 1930s, virtually all modern synthetic plastics were introduced, virtually all at Du Pont. Some of those saw introduction during WWII, though most didn't make widespread appearance until afterward.
The seismic shift in fashions from the 1940s-1950s to the 1960s wasn't just due to the everyday adoption of what had been working-man's clothing (denim blue jeans and cotton tee-shirts), but synthetic fabrics and dyes.
During the industrial revolution, it was thread-handling characteristics as well as cost which drove the adoption of cotton. Wool was too elastic, and tangled in machines (and was expensive). Silk was prohibitively expensive. Flax threads are insufficiently elastic, and would break.
Cotton threads were just right, and could be spun, spindled, and woven on early mechanical equipment. Cost was relatively low, and England / Britain has ample supplies from its colonies in Egypt and the Americas.
But I do like the feel on the older stuff that consumed more material.
Same for furniture - the cardboard+wood miracle of engineering may work for a while, but have kids or move home once and it'll be beyond its limits. The bookcase my great-grandfather made as part of his cabinet maker apprenticeship is doing fine... One joint is a little sloppy and probably needs a little maintenance, but it's moved house (and family) dozens of times...
One thing I am sure of though - for brand profit, trousers that are worn out under five years are far better than those that might last fifteen. Especially if you can trade off retained customer belief in a maker of good quality - which few of them are any more.
For heavy pants, I wear black cotton gi bottoms. I've tried to find heavy raw silk, but it's not readily available.
In a piece I'd submitted to HN a few days ago, she discussed the matter of a cheap Chinese knock-off of a 15th century gown. Somehow an item made of wool-blend, silk, and other fabrics, constructed over 250 hours, was being sold for $40.98.
Short-cuts were taken.
Aside from a host of other aspects (ownership of ideas, fraud, misappropriation of likeness, etc.), the segment is a tour de force of textile and garment techniques and technologies. As is virtually all of Ms. Banner's video archive. I've virtually no interest in the topic itself, though I'm somewhat aware of the historical significance of clothing technology and its role in the Industrial Revolution. She herself is must-watch Web-V, based on knowledge, wit, charm, diction, geek-out nerdiness, and sheer enthusiasm for her topic.
In the dozen or so videos I've watched to date, she covers many of the elements you describe (possibly excepting zippers).
In overall impact, I'd compare her work with Primitive Technology. Much of the framing is different, but the end result, someone captivated by and exceedingly competent in what they're doing, sharing it with the world, is quite similar.
BTW, I notice that you also have an interest in printing. Don't know if you've ever taken a class in it, but I did (semester-long "Introduction to Printmaking" at a local art school at night) and it was an amazing experience. I was way outclassed by everyone else who knew at least how to draw, paint, etc, but I still had a lot of fun learning about various printing techniques, types of paper, etc.
I have numerous interests. There is a madness to the method, I swear! (Or vice versa.)
History of print and media is a somewhat recent interest, though I've had numerous relevant prior experiences. Little by way of formal instruction.
According to that site, £ 1 in 1330 would be £ 1056.57 in 2018. So the 1330 penny would be worth about £ 4.40375 today. That thatcher would make about £ 13.21 a day, and the tunic would cost £ 158.54, or about $205 in a currency we're more familiar with. For that to be "two weeks' wages" implies a yearly wage of about £ 3800, or $4900. (Of course as the linked site points out, that sort of income calculation doesn't account for non-monetary sources of consumption, which were non-negligible back then.)
A currency you're more familiar with. Many of us are familiar with multiple currencies, including GBP, EUR, and, yes, USD.
To whit – you're comparing decimal GBP to predecimal pounds, shillings and pence. You might as well compare drachma.
I like to hold something constant as a reference point, but you have to think about what, because for instance, if you're choosing between gold, silver, bread, beer, chicken, or beef, then you have to consider that they may have changed price dramatically relative to each other so which one you use makes a big difference.
I guess an inflation calculator is good if you really know what people bought, but it seems like information would be sparse enough that might mislead you. And like others have said, buying things with money, let alone documenting it, would have been far less prevalent.
https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2011/12/impractical-cheesebur...
Subsequently the CPI "market basket" approach dominated.
The fact that meat, especially beef, was a rarity in most diets, makes the Big Mac example not particularly germane.
I believe it's Adam Smith who noted that whilst the price of corn ("grain") is highly variable year-to-year, owing to fluctuations in crop yields, it was remarkably constant century to century.
The Green Revolution changed this, of course, though by some arguments, that relies strongly on unaccounted costs.
I'm not saying there's any alternative, ultimately, to the concept of an average consumption basket, just that methods of determining it might be different. When you have really limited data, you can look at it more closely, and you probably need to, to leverage the context because it's not going to be an unbiased sample.
In this case that someone is Greg Clark (Professor of Economics at UC Davis). The link goes direct to a .xlsx which reveals the "basket" and all the figures - it's a mixture of several (presumably average) wages and a "cost of living".
This is probably the research paper (2009) http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Macroa...
One difference, of course, is that weaving was much more centralized to start with (spinning needed next to no machinery and a lot less training), so the economic impacts were very different.
You have a pretty captive market.