What Can a Person Wear? | Hacker News Reader

What Can a Person Wear?

thekramerisnow.blogspot.com

| My experience with natural fabric clothing is that it either hangs like a giant pillowcase over my body or it bunches and binds in the ugliest way

This is why the world needs tailors and seamstresses. Someone skilled with a needle can take those clothes in or let them out where they need to be and make them look fantastic.

For a cost, of course. But as the article points out, microplastics are also a cost.

They talk about waste and impact, and then say things like "OMG if I gain 3 pounds my tailored clothes won't fit". That just means they're getting the wrong kind of clothes then. Get functional clothes that continue to work even if you gain 20 pounds. Don't get clothes that are so useless you can't gain a few pounds. That problem should only exist for children who just keep growing. I don't see why fashion has to be so hard for some people.

It seems this person's idea of what "looks good" is the mainstream thing: useless non-functional clothing that costs way more than it's worth and goes out of style by next week. "Ugh I guess I'll wear peasant clothes and just not look good". Reminds me of people who think wearing makeup is the same thing as looking good.

From the author’s selfie, she doesn’t seem to crave high fashion, so why not shop at thrift stores? The selection is great, clothing is avoiding the landfill, and it’s cheaper than new.

I have gotten a fine knock-off pea coat, and a Boston Celtics jacket that might come in handy this playoff season. (I grew up in the Boston area.) And lots more.

Most of my clothes are thrift store finds, and many are cotton making a second spin around the block.

> Of course, you can get around production problem by buying used items. I could go to thrift stores and consignment shops and try to find the few things with all natural fibers, and just wear those, and I could learn how to mend and patch them so they don't have to be tossed as they start to wear out, as natural fibers so easily do.

> I could do that, but I have not done that. Why not? I could say I've been busy, a stock answer that is also true, but I think the real reason goes deeper. The truth is that I avoid natural fabrics because I think they won't look good on me.

> Natural fibers are mostly non-stretchy. I'm not super curvy, but I am moderately curvy. My experience with natural fabric clothing is that it either hangs like a giant pillowcase over my body or it bunches and binds in the ugliest way around my breasts, hips, and stomach.

The thing about the complaint that natural fibers are ill-fitting is a bit odd. It's true that less stretchy clothing is more forgiving, but it's also true that the ill-fitting aspect is because of the cut, not the fiber. The problem can be easily and (relatively) cheaply fixed by having the garment altered to fit you.

> Now, I know the answer to this as well: tailoring. You read any serious piece about fashion and fit and they will tell you that to look good, you have to get your clothes tailored to fit your body by someone who knows what they are doing.

> I can imagine a world in which that is a standard activity that I could engage in, but our world is not that world. Last time I wanted pants made shorter, most places I went wanted me to have pinned them up myself beforehand. I found a place that would do the fitting part, and it took weeks, a couple of follow-up nudge calls, and several trips there to get it all done. Plus, what if I gain or lose a few pounds? Am I going to get things perfectly fitted around my torso then be unable to wear them a month later? Ugh.

For some reason, I missed that part.

It sounds like she lives in an area lacking in in tailors. That's too bad. Perhaps an alternative is to learn how to do it herself?

> Plus, what if I gain or lose a few pounds? Am I going to get things perfectly fitted around my torso then be unable to wear them a month later?

No. A good fit will easily accommodate gaining or losing a few pounds without requiring another round of tailoring.

The modern trend for everything to be "fitted" for the most part didn't exist a few decades ago - look at older photos of people wearing suits in the street, they generally were a bit baggier especially trousers.

In addition, people spent a lot more on clothing than they do now as a percentage of income.

There are also still now plenty of cultures in which clothing isn't intended to hug the body.

I think that the author is basically just finding out that tailoring is for the wealthy unless you learn to do it yourself.

Another guess is that these clothes were designed with gender in mind, e.g. a suit is made to accentuate masculine features. It doesn't sound as if the author is wearing clothing designed for the female silhouette. Nothing wrong with that, but it's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. No amount of tailoring is going to make a dress look good on my broad shoulders.

Yeah it's cyclical. Fashion goes from tight fitting to loose to baggy and back again.

There exist several filters intended to be fitted to the washing machine to trap the microfiber shedding. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/reduce-laundry-micro... this had several products to address the situation - I don't think solutions like this should be categorized as "lame", that's incredibly lazy and negative, and I think encourages people to have the "fuck it, let's dance in the flames of the world burning" attitude. Washing less often and at lower temps will also decrease the shedding. I think we need to take a 'harm reduction' approach, filter the micro plastics at sources, reserve synthetic clothes for when they are required, address the fast fashion waste problem. It's not just micro plastics, but when clothes are only worn for a season, there's a ton of waste and environmental impact.

The author is correct on use cases, for a lot of applications, synthetic fibers are the only viable answer. As a drysuit diver with a wool allergy, I cannot avoid synthetic fibers in my undergarments (warm clothes you wear under the drysuit designed to still insulate you long enough to safely exit your dive even if the drysuit fails and is flooded). I have thought about the irony of this as I do cleanup dives to remove larger plastic pieces from the ocean.

One thing I learned about recently was that clothes now are a single size where clothing from the past had features that allowed changes in weight and size without needing to throw the clothes away.

It might be time to look at adjustable clothing styles again, but it would require a fashion change as there isn't much that can be done to a t-shirt to make it "adjustable".

There are fashions which are current and involve a measure of adjustability. It isn't necessary to wear only robes and wrapped cloth to achieve this although I understand the occasional desire to throw in (on?) the towel and give up fitted primarily western style clothing altogether. However the idea that clothing today is "just" a fixed size is merely one way of looking at it which you can choose to do or not.

Formal/business attire: tailoring is nice but a military tuck lets a dress shirt conform to the belly you have, not the one (or several) it was patterned on.

Casual, work and streetwear: additional snaps, buttons, and ties are often used to allow the wearer to fit to their body and desired motion. Some brands have a show clear intention, such as having a small pleat or even slit in the pant waist with elastic so that it can be worn high or low at a range of sizes. More commonly, elastic pulls on jackets or athletic pants. Others have give less direction but more options by leaving button holes or grommets so the wearer can create their own shape and hold it.

On the consumer end it is difficult to tell when a garment is designed with any of this in mind or if it's just mindless copying or following trends. Having some minuscule knowledge into the design side I can say that it's a mix of both. Brands which care about it have designers who care and try to research these things to use them strategically; they tend to signal the versatility by readily showing models wearing them in different, sometimes unintended ways. Streetwear is ripe with this because brands often produce less meaning less sizes available and they (and their customers) value the suggested creativity. If you can only make S, M, L or M, L, XL but want 5ft women and 6.5ft men to enjoy them that is a challenge which some designers live for.

Clothes still exist that are adjustable, I buy them often.

You just won't find them in Primark for £6.

You could never get good quality clothes for less than an hour of working class wages, it doesn't make sense because they take more than an hour's labour to produce.

It's hard to find clothing made from natural fibers like organic cotton nowadays

Cotton production uses immense amounts of water. It may not contain plastic micro-beads, but it is a eco-disaster.

Much of the US can grow cotton without irrigation. So in effect it can use effectively zero water in some places and a great deal in others.

People assume water is in a limited supply simply because they live in an area poorly suited to human habitation. Instead there’s more than a 10x difference in annual precipitation between the dryer areas and wet areas of the US: https://www.eldoradoweather.com/climate/US%20Climate%20Maps/...

I prefer cotton to plastic fibers floating everywhere in our environment after washing clothes. In plastic clothes, a lot of people (me including) smell awful and no amount of antiperspirants helps.

Yep. Just for fun, I searched for "wool shirt", clicked the first result, opened the first men's shirt I found[1], and checked the fabric: 38% Montana Merino Wool, 50% American Polyester, 12% Modal (beech wood pulp). Half plastic, when I searched specifically for wool.

[1] https://www.duckworthco.com/products/mens-vapor-pocket-tee

It is not? I prefer to avoid plastic in general, so most clothes I buy are 100% cotton. If I wanted to, I could also go with organic cotton instead, it’s almost always an option for online clothing stores (less so for the metal band shirts which I wear 99% of the time).

I remember when fleece and microfiber fabrics (made out of recycled plastic bottles) were introduced and loved because it "kept plastic out of the waste stream." Nobody thought ahead to "those cheap blankets and jackets are going to be thrown away too" (I've never seen fleece fabric accepted for recycling) and "they shed microfibers every time you wash them."

99% this was a marketing piece masquerading as a blogpost - see plug at the bottom.

> It's a lame solution, like so many modern solutions. The plastic fibers will still be out there -- they'll just be in the marginally more appropriate place of a landfill rather than our drinking water.

Doesn't read like a submarine article, and the rest of blog seems pretty earnest.

Whether or not it was intentional, it certainly fits the model of "creating anxiety relievable by purchase"

Funny, I don't remember any plug. If there was one, I didn't read it. I read the comments, I noticed a couple of book covers to some books I didn't read the title of, and I run an adblocker.

I mean, there was all sorts of little chrome bits on the page. I noticed the photo, I can't tell you want any of the text around the photo said. Mabye I caught the name (starts with a P? Maybe?).

I'm not saying there is no plug. I'm not saying it's not a "marketing piece masquerading". But I am saying, that, anecdotally, for me, that way I consume content, if that was the goal -- it didn't work.

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