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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Millions of people have been killed so that other people wouldn't have to wear itchy clothes.

Convenience is the most powerful force in humanity.

Was linen itchy? At least modern linen is not itchy. Presumably it would have been less itchy than coarse wool even nice wool.

Itchy is maybe exaggerating, but as far as I know, lower class clothes were very coarse compared to modern ones.

A lot of natural fibers need a lot of strength to be spun into finer threads and we didn't really have that on a large scale until the 1800s.

Plus distribution was much harder so in many remote parts were stuck with whatever they made locally, which was most likely subpar even for their times.

Cotton tech in the 1800s really revolutionized clothing.

Was that the merino massacre of 1887?

Something to do with the Silk Road?

Silk, and in general almost every type of clothing until modern cotton processing. Most traditional clothing was very coarse and one of the most obvious class indicators, across millenia.

silk was so in demand and so lucrative a product that at one point smuggling silk worms out of china was punishable by death. I think the price of a silk shirt in the middle ages was roughly comparable to a luxury car today.

These comparisons always bring up the fact in my mind that the lowest class people today have so much better sanitation, like toilets compared to kings back then

Is there a specific war, genocide, or other event that you were referencing though? I wanted to learn more.

I guess it was the main driver of slavery in the US...

Convenience is the mother of invention

*laziness

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