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Comment by cen4 | Hacker News Reader

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You missed the last sentence where I explicitly stated that other companies could produce similar products, but it’d very likely be more expensive and less functional?

I’m sure we could spin up some other custom suit production facility, but it wouldn’t save us money vs using the existing fully in-house pipelines already battle-tested by the industry leaders.

Just like most people don’t understand the inner workings of software, a lot of software engineers seem to not understand there’s deep layers of skill and technology beneath things that many would deem useless, like fashion. I’d like to see more crossover between science and “regular people stuff” like this.

The deep layers of skill have always been interesting to me. I used to watch a lot of project runway and those awful cooking shoes on food network because you could catch glimpses of hugely technical skill.

Those are the shows that helped me to understand, partly, that every job from janitor to Jesus requires specialized knowledge gained over years of experience. I’m sad that on hacker news there are so many negative comments and closed minds.

Read The Theory of the Leisure Class and understand what the purpose is of "Conspicuous Luxury".

It is usually taught to business and economics classes to servants of the Elite that require that knowledge to manage their assets. Not to the "high skilled" clueless servants in the factory and design studios.

Yes, some luxury products are little lore than a brand icon tiled to cover the entirety of a poorly made hand bag. I agree.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the preeminent fabric/leather/composite composing studio in the world with a long history of creating military, sporting, racing, and yes: fashion goods. They have a fully in house production pipeline and complete control over every step of the process, something unique to them across all of the boutiques. They additionally have a long history of creating new and unique patterns for their prices, and are arguably the most knowledgeable folks on the plant when it comes to designing cuts for optimal 3D shape, flexibility, and long term performance.

But don’t just take my word for it, consider what an actual astronaut who has spent 1,200+ hours in space and used suits like this for life support while floating hundreds of miles above the earth’s surface performing critical repairs to Hubble and many other scientific instruments says:

> Prada has considerable experience with various types of composite fabrics and may actually be able to make some real technical contributions to the outer layers of the new space suit

- Jeffery Hoffman, 5 time astronaut and 4 time space walker.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67022619

I’ll take that over 100+ year old ramblings from a time when folks thought artisans hand stitching every garment was the baseline.

Can’t recommend the Alexander McQueen documentary enough for a glimpse of genius at work.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt6510332/

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