The trad thing is that your old clothes become your casual clothes, mostly. Except athletic clothes—but half those are dress or business-casual now, anyway, like OCBDs and polos—most of our modern athletic clothes counted as underwear, before, if they existed at all. And it doesn't really work for full-on formal wear like dinner jackets or morning dress.

A bunch of suiting trends come from this. Suit jacket with ruined pants? Now it's a blazer, so, casual wear. Handmedown worn 3-button suit that you're wearing casually at college, with the top button pretty much permanently unbuttoned? You've just invented the 2-roll-3 jacket style. And so on.

We've replaced this behavior with simply having all our clothes be disposable-cheap. Mending a hole and adding patches to keep wearing something's not really worth it when it cost $20 to begin with.

A(nother) good point. In my case the compensation adequately covered it; I guess some others' don't, which was a blind spot in my post.

To defend myself a bit, though, most conversations I see around this topic are referring to comfort.