All clothing is handmade (2022) | Hacker News Reader

All clothing is handmade (2022)

ruthtillman.com

162 pointspanic175 comments

Somewhat related: has anyone done a study of inflation in terms of clothing adjusted for quality? This piece notes, for instance, that manufacturers have been reducing thread quality (having exhausted their ability to reduce fabric quality, I suppose) for decades, with major implications for clothing longevity.

I’ve long suspected a lot of supposed economic progress since, especially, the 1970s, has just been goods getting worse.

Go look at what it costs to get a chambray work shirt (where we got the term “blue collar”, so, made for physical labor, not something fancy) made with similar-quality fabric and construction to a common 1940s or 1950s offering in a Sears catalog. Not the ones J Crew or whoever sells, those are fine for what they are but they’re not built for work, the fabric’s thinner and they lack extensive double- or triple-stitching and other reinforcement.

If you find one under $150, please let me know.

Similar story for jeans, sweatshirts… everything. Hell, even athletic socks were better-made decades ago.

[edit] for reference, a 1930s Sears Hercules work shirt, basically an early model of what I’m writing about above, cost $0.79. Adjusted for official inflation figures? That’s about $18. $18 shirts are almost all terrible now. This is why I suspect there’s some bullshit going on with the metrics, and it involves laundering (ha!) worse goods into alleged improvements in the standard of living. This would also help explain (along with Baumol’s) why some things so consistently outpace nominal inflation: because nominal inflation isn’t capturing reality very well, so when it hits something that can’t (for whatever reason) be made worse, that thing seems to “outpace” inflation.

My dad was privy to my grandfather complaining to my great-great grandfather about the bad quality of houses, tractors, and clothes in the 1950s — that the stuff built in the 1910s and 1920s was so much better. Carl (in his thick southern German accent) made the point that all the cheap clothes they bought to keep them out of jail (public nudity) disintegrated in a year and the only clothes that survived were the expensive ones, or the random ones that somehow survived the test of time. Apparently he'd had the same argument with his grandfather back in the 1890s. Sooo... I dunno; maybe things have always gotten worse, and were always better in the past? That doesn't seem to jive with the way I live vs the literal log fucking cabin they lived in.

What people think is quality and what is are not always the same.

Modern building codes make the cheapest houses much better than the best houses from 100 years ago. Nobody knows how to see insulation so they don't count it. Old houses often overbuild some obvious beam and so that part of the house is very strong, but some other beam wasn't strong. Yes old houses had access to old growth trees that were stronger, but that doesn't make up for good engineering.

Insulation used to be a ton less important—wood and gas heating were cheap, and nobody had air conditioning because it didn't exist yet.

What was more important was the layout of the house, the windows, and the ceiling heights, all being thoughtfully arranged to allow the right kinds of airflow in the right seasons.

Most modern houses in climates like seen in most of the US turn into an unbearable mold-farm of a wet oven if the AC is turned off over the Summer—they depend on AC or they start kinda decaying in place within a year, aside from being unbearable to enter on a hot day. A 1900-construction house that hasn't been updated to something like modern standards is far more comfortable to live in, in those circumstances.

(your broader point that some things in modern houses are better due to e.g. improving materials or engineering even as other things like framing have gotten worse due to worsening materials, I don't dispute, but modern house design as far as airtightness and insulation is very much a trade-off that leaves them dependent on AC in many—and, as the Earth warms, ever-more—climates, not strictly an improvement)

> wood and gas heating were cheap, and nobody had air conditioning because it didn't exist yet.

Gas heating in an old house for just one month uses more energy than all HVAC loads for a year in a similar sized new house. Where I live you must heat during that month of the pipes freeze/break so there is no getting around.

House design!

I live on the Potomac River in Virginia and am regularly shocked that the "come here" houses are what they left behind in northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs. Houses are not designed for cross ventilation or with deep porches, and the like. I mean, all the cottages we visited on Cape Cod in my younger days were designed to have windows open and for the natural sea breeze to do the heavy lifting.

Hi neighbor! We don't get quite as much sea breeze here in the swamp.

The old family farm, in Indiana, had all these short "barns". Because they were from Germany, they couldn't figure out how to build properly footed foundations, in the Indiana wilderness. The result was the bottom logs of the houses kept rotting out. So, every 10-or-so years, they'd just build a new log cabin. The old log cabin was the new barn. And, yeah, the old growth logs meant most of the cabins were only 4 logs high, since each log was 3' thick, after they were squared up. By the time the cabin rotted out the second log, the last logs were dry enough they'd stop rotting. The farm had a number of these weird, short, log cabin barns.

There's a huge survivorship bias in the overall conversation about old things being better than new things.

The poorly made houses from 100 years ago just aren't there anymore.

The junk clothing from 50 years ago was thrown out.

wrong, the hight of wood technology and understanding is behind us I have worked on many very old wooden buildings, dateing back to the mid 1700's and learned from the last carpenters and shipwrights, blacksmiths standing who carried those traditions, as things they learned as part of a greater whole. The understanding of how to keep structures dry, and also, how the inevitable condensation and leakage must be shed, is wraped up in tiny details, choices in wood species and specific grain orientations. If you are discussing, settler built homes, then the choices become based on pragmatism and litteral, life/death survival decisions, so things like, a stone fireplace, but @3' the chimney is chinked log or split wood, and I have seen wooden chimney foundations,made from truely massive, huen timbers, dovetailed together, 36" plus timbers,still supporting an in use kitchen apparatus, after 300 years. How is that possible?, simple, site selection, dry but not too dry, with a spring for a well close by, and if you dig into the details, there is plenty of history around choosing "dry wells" just for, basements and larders, non muddy spots for a house, etc. It is a mistake and a disservice to underestimate the sophistication of the many many, hidden details and the consious choices behind them, in our ancestors lives. seaweed, insulation, and "brushing" foundations every fall...... goes on and on

Old buildings are often stronger because they didn’t have the modelling and precision manufacturing required to make them to an exact standard - instead they were overbuilt.

"Anyone can build a bridge that doesn't fall down. Only engineers build bridges that only barely don't fall down."

> That doesn't seem to jive with the way I live vs the literal log fucking cabin they lived in.

I propose that different goods have different trajectories. Lighting is better and cheaper than 100 years ago. Boots maybe aren't.

Maybe, but boots for sure are better and cheaper than 100 years ago. I think the only thing that makes this slightly confusing is that what were old mass-produced workwear have become limited-run fashion items, so looking at things like M1918 boots or cowboy boots and comparing to modern Red Wings or Luccheses it's tempting to say "Oh how much more expensive leather-soled brass-hardware hand-tanned full-grain leather boots are now", ignoring that Modern soldiers wear lightweight goretex running shoe-boots and farmers wear cozy neoprene pull-ons with anti-slip soles and carbon fibre toes, both of which cost half of inflation-adjusted prices of the objectively inferior boots of 1925.

You're right that modern work and military boots are generally better for their specific purpose -- they are certainly much lighter and usually cheaper than their older equivalents. They can also be more ergonomic and breathable while still being water-resistant due to modern materials and processes. But I will say that the durability of leather, metal-hardware, stitched/nailed-sole boots is unmatched. They can be re-soled and repaired unlike (most of) their modern counterparts, and will last generations if properly cared for. And there are still jobs out there for which they are the best option.

Go look up the origin of the word "shoddy" as it relates to the crappy field uniforms unscrupulous vendors sold to the Federal government during the Civil War.

That's interesting - I always assumed that "shoddy" and "slipshod" were related since their meanings are so similar, but apparently not!

Thanks for leading me to that definition.

As the supply chain strengthens and expands, things breaking becomes more and more acceptable.

A hundred years ago if a piece of clothing broke it meant you or a family member would repair it yourself. Fifty years ago you could buy a new one at a clothing store in a city. Now I can order one off Amazon that'll arrive at my doorstep in the morning.

Availability is less important for superfluous for unnecessary things, but for things people's lives depend on reliability was important in a way it isn't today. A coat wearing through or a knife breaking could mean death, a long time ago.Things were expected to be cared for and fixed for decades rather than replaced.

Shoddy things have always been around, but tolerance for them slowly yet persistently grows.

> that the stuff built in the 1910s and 1920s was so much better.

Pre-war goods.

Is this true tho? It feels like a made-up reply and gaslighting. You demonstrated that you can say the opposite of what OP experiences. Now what?

It is unfair you're being downvoted by pointing out my anecdote. I argued the same point, too!

Here's another point: the Greeks used to complain about their students using punctuation & spaces in their scrolls, because it'd rot their pupils' brains; when novels (books!) became popular, academics thought it'd be the downfall of civilization.

New is different; different is bad.

There’s two things going on here:

1. You’re, rightfully, pointing out the “kids these days” bias that societies tend to have. Humans are risk-averse by nature and old things register in our monkey brains as better. This is all true.

2. Some goods are actually worse. Objectively. Clothing is one of them.

I buy and curate menswear from the 1960s and 1970s. Full suits, trousers, vests, trench coats, you know. The quality is just not comparable to modern menswear. Almost all of these items look brand new, and when pressed, better than new clothes made today.

They’re much sturdier, with no fraying or pilling. Most hold their shape to an unbelievable degree - one pressing session will easily last for 3 months of wear.

The viscose and polyester stuff is better, too, but naturally not as long-living as cotton or wool. But still, I have seen 60 year old polyester trousers with no pilling. Modern trousers can barely survive 3 washes without pilling.

How do you know they were better made back then?

This is a place where you have to be extremely aware of survivor bias.

You also have to be very careful about inflation adjusted dollars vs actual wealth values. For instance the median income in the US in 1933 was between $500 and $1000. Inflation adjusted that’s between 15 and 30k but our median income now is much higher than that.

Anecdotally my grandmother felt she was wealthy compared to her peers in the 1930s because her family could buy a dress per person per year from the Sears catalog.

We have both real examples of specific common models, and depictions (photos, sales art) of same, and not just ones regarded as “high end” (which, we’re talking outdoor workwear in an age when that wasn’t remotely fashionable like it would be after the 1950s, so there weren’t really fancy versions of these) and the fabric is better, and the construction more involved and durable, than that in an $50+ chambray shirt today. For a (supposedly) inflation-adjusted $18.

Most of the examples I’ve found that approach the originals in quality are $200 or more. I want to know if anyone tracks one down for less than $150, because I’d likely own 2-3 of them before the year’s out if they do. 8x the supposedly inflation-adjusted price of the original would be, from what I can tell, a bargain.

Your note that a dress per year felt like a lot is exactly my point: if I had to pay $150 per blue-collar work shirt I’d feel like I was doing pretty great if I could responsibly buy a couple per year. IOW, buying similar quality goods, our alleged improvements in QOL are significantly diminished.

[edit] if you look into what decently-constructed (not even finely-made! Just, like, not shit) dresses made with fabrics that aren’t mostly or entirely plastic cost, they’re hundreds of dollars today, even for fairly simple ones, especially midi-length or longer (as there’s more fabric than in a mini)

Here is an American made work shirt for $70 https://www.allamericanclothing.com/collections/mens-long-sl... it's in khaki not blue and the cloth is twill vs chambray but thats because twill is a better fabric for the use case.

And as a reminder blue collar work was _an improvement_ over the default which was agricultural work. Most workers in the US could not afford to buy clothing from a catalog in the 1930s.

The dress comparison was as opposed to her peer group who wore clothes made out of seed bags.

> a dress per year

Also keep in mind that the quality and durability of that dress, and similarly-priced clothing of the era, made it possible to not need to buy new every season. That dress could be expected to last for years, longer with simple repairs.

Also, shoes are even worse than clothing for declining price/decreasing quality.

You’re not kidding, I can’t friggin’ believe how bad $70 sneakers can be these days. My shitty wal mart kids’ shoes for $10 or whatever in the ‘90s held up way better than a lot of these.

Oddly, the low end getting worse while prices also go up has made $200+ good leather shoes more attractive, LOL. Though I expect we’re about to either see most of those companies go out of business, or hike prices $100 or so in a short period of time, given post-2021 labor price increases. They’ve got to be hurting for margin right now.

I have two pairs of sneakers I wear for a lot of things. They get at least weekly use. Both are >4 years old. One was a pair of Sketchers I got for $40, the other was some pair that didn't even have a box I got for $9 at Walmart.

You don't say how long you wear them, how much you're on your feet wearing them, or how far you move wearing them. Shoes don't wear out (much) from being put on and taken off, and weekly use is light use.

On the flip side, four years is nothing. I have shoes I bought over thirty years ago, and all I've ever done is replace the insoles. Even the laces are original.

Trips to the office and general errands, work around the house and yard, walks through the park and neighborhood, playing with the kids at the playground, some light bike riding along with sometimes bike riding as a commute. Normal everyday wear stuff for an office drone. At least weekly, because I switch off between the two shoes (one's more grey and the other is black) and some flip flops depending on the weather for my general everyday wear. Some days I'll wear nicer shoes, some days I'll wear one of my pairs of boots, so its not really an every day thing to wear those shoes but each probably gets at least 2 days a week on average of all day wear.

I'd say over four years of this a few days a week on a $9 pair of sneakers is pretty decent. They'll likely hit at least six or seven before replacement.

And yeah, I have some nice dress shoes that I've had for twenty years that pretty much look like the day I bought them. They get worn like 2-3 times a year. I also have leather cowboy boots I bought over 15 years ago that had their heels replaced a couple of years ago and are otherwise still in great shape. Both were more than $9 though. I think the boots were like $110 back when I bought them at Cavender's. The comment I was replying to:

> I can’t friggin’ believe how bad $70 sneakers can be these days

Even in the 90s my sneakers usually fell apart within a few years, and I rarely even owned $70 sneakers back then even adjusted for inflation. These days I can get sneakers for about $15 that last just about as long as the sneakers I owned in the 90s. That's the equivalent of buying ~$6 shoes in 1990 by many inflation calculators.

These are my cheap sneakers, a little bit different but the same brand and general style:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Athletic-Works-Men-s-Banded-Jogge...

I've been disappointed in my $150 shoes that were made in the US. I'm about ready to get some leather and make my own.

Unfortunately, it costs $400+ these days to get quality shoes. It’s possible to find cheaper examples, but well made durable leather shoes are expensive if you buy them new.

We don't need to go back to the 1930s though. I have two pairs of leather winter boots that have lasted for a very long time now. How long these last obviously will depend on actual usage. I.e. keep in mind that these aren't work boots on a construction site. Just regular full leather winter boots for a HN type dude that drove to the train station and then walked to the office etc. plus some use for going on winter walks, going out for groceries, weekend activities etc.

One pair, $230, made in USA. Just looked it up, are now 10 years old. Perfectly fine and at this rate will last another 10, then be resoled and last another 20. These cost $440 now.

The other, which I used more often actually, made in I don't know where, are now almost 20 years old and still perfectly fine as well, tho the outsoles will need work soon.

I basically switch between the two whenever I need to wear some winter boots, except for when it's super cold, then I take out the Baffins, which are the only boots that have kept my feet warm no matter what.

In the same timeframe I've run through regular sneakers of the ~$50 kind from Costco about once per year (and I also keep 2 pairs around so I never have the same ones on two days in a row)

Rancourt starts around $200. Their styles lean casual, and their dressier options (and certainly their boots) cost more, but the construction and materials are really good.

Rancourt does make nice shoes for under $400, and so does Red Wing. Meermins are a Spanish brand you can get for under $400. Aside from that, it’s $400+ for Grant Stones and $600+ for Aldens, and even higher for Viberg, Edward Green, etc.

The desire to have a diverse and up to date wardrobe has changed whether someone is willing to only have one dress and if it is worth repairing. It’s not that people need to buy new every season, they want to. This puts downward pressure on price and quality.

People used to shop at goodwill or consignment shops. As a kid we went to church with a woman who never wore the same dress - it was affordable because she bought and sold on consignment most of the time - basically she was renting everything.

Vintage quality and style is back in, so there is a lot of clothing reuse in hip fashion. However, secondhand only works because people buy a surplus of clothing!

Secondhand only works when people buy clothing quality enough to be worth going secondhand.

People still do.

Perhaps the true inflation tracks the price of equivalent shirts

If you're saying there are equivalent shirts today that are as good but just in different styles and materials, I don't think there are, not at the inflation-adjusted ~$18. $50, and maybe you're getting somewhere. Maybe.

I do get that the specific type I called out might have some functional equivalent that's simply a different style & material but is just as good, but not that cheap, they don't. Under $150, probably, sure. Under $50? No.

This suggests that the cost of clothing has inflated at more like 3x the nominal inflation rate, despite the existence of $18 (or cheaper!) shirts—the inflation was eaten up by worsening quality, rather than showing up in prices, but like for like, even with a generous "functional equivalent" accounting, the change was more like $0.79 -> $50+ than $0.79 -> ~$18—your "equivalent" dollar under the latter calculation in-fact buys less.

You are talking about the hedonic adjustments which is a hugely studied part of inflation calculations. For any way to calculate broad inflation you’ll find products that inflated more than the calculation (and less).

Your own example is an interesting one because a) it’s very hard to compare clothing by objective quality b) you’re changing the goal posts. I’ve found a carhart product that nearly exactly matches your specification and msrp’s for $40. I’ve seen discounters selling it for $25. Which is getting very close to your specific target.

I'm curious what other things when compared for quality would have a higher than 'normal' inflation. Perhaps we've been suffering a higher inflation across many 'dimensions'. If CPI doesn't control for enshitification, we technically have more inflation than we believe

This would still undercount the other hidden part of inflation, which is loss of quality of services. It's sometimes subtle, but once you see it, you'll keep spotting it - the main service itself may not get worse, but everything around it does. Worse seating in the waiting rooms, magazines replaced with first-party ads, worse decor or lack of it, less complimentary items, dark patterns aimed at reducing usage of side offerings without eliminating them, adding complicated online processes, etc.

My pet peeve is automated checkouts and ordering kiosks. These save stores and venues on labor costs by making the customers do the work for the store. For free, and disproportionally wasting customers' time.

(In many cases this applies to self-service in general.)

> My pet peeve is automated checkouts and ordering kiosks. These save stores and venues on labor costs by making the customers do the work for the store. For free, and disproportionally wasting customers' time.

Based on what I’ve heard, it may be wasting time somewhere like Germany where the staff are scanning your items at lightning speed. However, here in Poland self-checkout is where you go to save time. Human-staffed checkouts are and have always been slow like an iceberg. Now and before self-checkout was ever a thing. I was relieved when they were introduced, precisely thanks to the time saved. I hate waiting in queues.

I live in Poland. The experience you attribute to Germany, is what I experienced in Poland. Still experience, on the off chance there's a human behind the register.

All self-checkout machines are moody and lock up if you so much as look at it funny. It would be somewhat acceptable if there was always a dedicated employee delegated solely to assist and unlock the machines, but stores cheap out even on that.

In America it always greatly depended in the store. Wal-mart, for instance, would get the worst workers, and checking out was insufferable. Target was better.

Now, you just need to deal with individual people being slow partially because it’s not their job and partially because it’s a lot less efficient to have a little kiosk vs a conveyer belt. Not to mention if you want to buy something that a store locks up you need to wait for them to go get it. Progress?

>> I’ve long suspected a lot of supposed economic progress since, especially, the 1970s, has just been goods getting worse.

> Go look at what it costs to get a chambray work shirt (where we got the term “blue collar”, so, made for physical labor, not something fancy) made with similar-quality fabric and construction to a common 1940s or 1950s offering in a Sears catalog.

> How do you know they were better made back then?

I think it's pretty clear based on what I've read about purchasing behavior back then: people would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.

Also, historically, stuff in the Sears catalog wasn't super special high-end stuff. It was common mass market stuff.

Sears tools were fabricated in American factories. Compare those to Harbor Freight.

The sad thing is, if one wanted to buy tools of any sort that weren't Harbor Freight, you'd go to another store and get the exact same quality but with different colored plastic handles that just cost twice as much. And instead of tool steel, they're made out of whatever pot metal happened to be around that day.

Furniture is now almost always made out of something like cardboard, compared to the real wood that it was constructed from in that era. It would amuse me as a child when I'd watch some old film and the people had all their worldly possessions piled up on top of the Model T or maybe even a cart, and I couldn't at the time understand why they were bothering to do that if they had to flee. Well, because I'd do the same if I could somehow afford dining room chairs that weren't cheap junk.

Someone in another forum was complaining about Pyrex cookware, which is hardly some luxury good itself. Apparently they've not been made of the proper borosillicate glass in a long time, and so they're no longer really oven-safe.

> It would amuse me as a child when I'd watch some old film and the people had all their worldly possessions piled up on top of the Model T or maybe even a cart, and I couldn't at the time understand why they were bothering to do that if they had to flee. Well, because I'd do the same if I could somehow afford dining room chairs that weren't cheap junk.

I think it's a bit more than that: those possessions not only weren't cheap junk, they also probably consisted of a significant fraction of that family's total wealth.

> that family's total wealth

It's a good example of the question: "where is your generational wealth stored up?"

For homeowner types it's in your real property and the house sitting on top of it. A home and land are assets that also come with significant costs for maintenance and upkeep. And homeowners are in ridiculous situations of living childfree in a 4BR/6BA filling up with litter boxes, or their kids all flee the nest and don't want Mom and Dad's old place at all? Owning land, however, is a good way to ensure that a family invests in their local community and cares about the direction it takes, because they're not liable to pull up their stakes and go elsewhere.

So a century ago, and probably for hundreds of years, if a family didn't own land, I can see furniture as the soundest investment for generational wealth. Because sturdy furniture can be used by anyone for a long time, and its maintenance costs can be minimal. So you sit in your great-grandfather's chair, and occasionally needing to move, hopefully find ways to take it all along with you. Sadly in an emergency, transportation costs and logistics can outstrip their value now. All the time I see people abandoning furniture because they didn't account for how unwieldy it becomes with time. But furniture and clothing are so replaceable, interchangeable, and nearly fungible, it's now a lousy way to store up wealth.

So where's your generational wealth built? What will your great-grandchildren enjoy when the world's a different place? Your 401(k)? A McMansion? Your Prius?

You can most certainly still buy real borosilicate PYREX. But most people will not buy a $32 borosilicate roasting pan when the soda-lime glass version is less than half the price at $15. The boro versions are marked PYREX, the soda glass ones are marked pyrex.

https://a.co/d/eoJiMuC

https://a.co/d/d8U1Vfq

> would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.

one problem though. My clothing would also last noticeably longer if I was hand-washing it. How much longer I don't actually know, but some of the dresses that was passed to me from older generations have never seen the inside of a washing machine. I also can find similar fabric in some stores, so, theoretically, some clothes today would also live for decades.

We have to adjust to washing machines and our washing habits. Some people I know wash their jeans every week. Every. Week. On a high speed. Yeah no shit they would fall apart in a year, that's like 20-30 washings in a year if they had 2 pairs.

>> would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.

> one problem though. My clothing would also last noticeably longer if I was hand-washing it.

While modern clothing might last longer if hand washed, the question is how long. Up-thread it was noted an old $18 (adjusted for inflation) work shirt has the quality features of a $200+ shirt today. I'm under the impression that no amount of babying would allow many modern clothing items to last a long as people used to wear their clothes.

> We have to adjust to washing machines and our washing habits.

And then we have to adjust washing habits to ongoing loss of quality^W^W^W progress of clothes.

This hit me once I started to see ads for laundry detergents supposedly able to clean clothes in cold water, like 20℃ or less - what's happening is, the fabrics and colors got so bad they start to degrade quickly even in 30℃ or 45℃ programs. The market, instead of giving us more durable clothes, decided to give us more high-tech detergent.

Oh, and this is sold under the guise of being eco-friendly - cold water = less energy. Even if that's a valid gain, I think it's not what's driving the existence of those detergents. Rather, they're the "fix" to the problem of low-quality clothes, and its existence only lets the quality get even worse (and further enabling the "fast fashion" phenomenon).

> people would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.

I think the point being made by the OP is that it might be a tenable strategy if you were to spend an equivalent portion of your income on said clothes - which would be ‘very expensive’ by modern standards.

> I’ve long suspected a lot of supposed economic progress since, especially, the 1970s, has just been goods getting worse.

My take is that for the most part the high quality stuff is, inflation adjusted, similarly priced, but the market is now saturated with an enormous amount of cheap stuff.

The $5-$10 shirts you can buy off Amazon would be literal pennies back then. You couldn't get clothing for pennies in the 1970s.

The problem now is that paying a high price doesn't imply quality.

> If you find one under $150, please let me know.

Gustin has a couple shirts that fit the profile, for instance this triple-stitched 11oz workshirt for $114 https://www.weargustin.com/store/shirts-168-italy-dark-oak-w...

Hahaha, I admit I posted in part to get the “HN is better than Google at finding things, as long as you claim it can’t be done” effect :-)

Not quite the fabric I had in mind, but those look damn good, really close style-wise, and are on the short-list for the next time I sit down to look over my next batch of clothing purchases. Thanks!

Crowd-funded, not available for direct order/purchase.

I generally assume crowd funded to mean "created by a quasi-outsider with not much industry knowledge who will make simple mistakes that drastically reduce the quality of the product"

This isn't a group looking to make a potentially one-off product in an attempt to break into the industry. This is a different marketing and manufacturing model that is trying to mini-max the cost-to-quality ratio by only making products that have already sold. Similar production quality as other selvedge denim companies like APC or Iron Heart, and sewn in the US. The fabric they source is often of limited supply, either discontinued or small production runs, from high quality mills.

Generally not the worst assumption, but these guys have been around for a decade plus

I doubt the sears catalog shirt was made by the thousands sitting on warehouse shelves.

The Five Brothers Shirt which I was gifted when I was down on my luck and just out of the service was made in a quantity which allowed a friend's aunt to purchase 4 of them as gifts for all the younger folks at her Christmas party that year, and there were quite a few on the sales floor at Sears when my folks took me school clothes shopping each year.

They are still in business, but I wonder what changed when the last time I looked at their shirts, they were north of $150, and now they are quite competitive in price, and I worry about the quality as is being debated in this thread.

Still have that shirt, four decades later, and still wear it around the house, though it's a bit frayed from rough work chopping and hauling firewood when I was younger.

OP mention shirts from the 30s-50s. I’m sure the operation warehoused more as the market changed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the garments 100 years ago were basically made to order for a mail order taking a week or more to deliver. I’d expect by the 80s this had entirely changed.

This is a good question and this is definitely happening but it's not clear how big a percentage of purchased goods fall into this category. Many other sectors (Automobiles, Consumer Electronics, Chemicals), have radically improved in quality since the 70s.

Your point about inflation is such a clear observation that it seems self-evident, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen decline in product quality linked explicitly to causing skewed inflation numbers (and even skewed productivity numbers) before. Would be fun to see a same-quality inflation index, as tricky as that would be.

Would a Filson[0] fit the bill ($145)? It’s 5oz. material (what weight are you targeting?).

Anecdotally, I wear a wool coat from Filson that is nearly 20 years old. Halfway through its life they reconstructed the fraying cuffs for free.

0: https://www.filson.com/products/chambray-cpo-shirt-rinsed-in...

Filson’s quality has continued to decline over the years.

Just to be clear: Filson is still "good" quality for the price IMO, but vintage Filson is built like a tank. My button down shirts from 15 years ago have never even needed a button replaced, whereas newer shirt construction from Bangladesh does not seem as strong to me. Material quality is better/heavier for my older shirts.

I'm not sure if they scrapped it, but somewhat recently (a year ago?) I saw that they were trying to facilitate sales of vintage Filson through their site presumably because they see the people who care about quality buying vintage Filson on eBay instead of the newer stuff they're selling.

Also, while it's certainly not the case that "made overseas = lesser quality", Filson's website has a prominently displayed filter/category for "Made in the USA". This is where you can get a really heavy knit sweater for $500 that IMO is worthy of the old Filson name.

This is the same story with everything. Companies all want to take as much as they can possibly squeeze out of you while giving you as little as they can get away with. A few companies start out by charging higher prices for higher quality, often pricing out a large number of consumers, but eventually the greed wins out and they start to cut corners too.

If you're wealthy enough to keep chasing after luxury goods you'll be ripped off at a slower pace than most, but eventually you'll be increasingly disappointed in what you're getting and have to look harder and harder, and pay higher and higher prices for anything nice. The poorest people are stuck paying increasing prices for poisonous products that are basically trash and that's all they can barely afford.

I am looking for the same. Some kind of consumer report for quality, threadcount, washing machine resistance, etc...

Consumer Reports could conceivably do this. But not easily.

Has cotton become more expensive in the last 90 years? What about labor? I'm sorry for being lazy, I don't have time right now to research. I just want to bring up the point that a lot can change in almost a century. So just doing an inflation-adjusted price comparison is not that helpful.

Oh, I don’t think it’s so much that: I think, rather, that improvements in economic productivity have been wildly overstated, especially since the 1970s, and instead we’ve been seeing a lot of our “improvements” in the form of goods getting worse. IOW inflation in terms of same-quality goods from the early or mid 20th century is a ton higher than our ordinary inflation rate, and much (not all!) of our “productivity improvements” are actually goods getting worse—inflation’s only as low as it is because we’re treating worse goods as comparable to better ones.

I think this thread is conflating "quality going down" and "low-cost tier getting cheaper and more popular."

Look at Ikea. They sell a wooden table with four chairs for $199 (Hagernas). $199 for a place for a family of four to eat on new furniture, and it looks all right! That is a remarkable amount of value. Even if that won't last forever, high-quality stuff has always been expensive; like any dining set that anyone would consider "quality" would be at least $1000 new, or the cost of five of these Ikea sets.

So I guess my point is that the Dust Bowl farmers who had nice furniture maybe only had that because they didn't have a choice; maybe they would have preferred to save that money or buy clothes or better food but they really had no low-end options. And having that choice for an Ikea table would have actually made them richer, not poorer.

Another factor is reluctance to repair. When a plastic laminated particle board breaks, virtually nobody wants to fix it. I don't personally know how, but it's not impossible. For whatever reason, simple repair skills have massively deteriorated in later generations.

> high-quality stuff has always been expensive

The argument being made here is that, if you hold quality constant and adjust for inflation, many goods now cost a greater percentage of the median income than they did in the past.

That argument seems false. It is land, education (or access to that network of people), and healthcare that is more expensive. Of course, the healthcare is much better than the before, so it’s not quite comparable.

I believe that real incomes, even under some expert analysis incorporating my vaguely-proposed adjustments and assuming I'm even right in the first place, are up! I haven't done the legwork to be prepared to argue against that, and anyway I very much doubt it's wrong. We are better off, over all, I think, than in the early 20th century (say).

I just also don't think we're as much better off as some common metrics suggest. I especially worry that those kinds of measurements have been badly decoupled from reality over, in particular, the last ~50 years or so, such that experienced improvements in standard of living are far smaller than one might think from looking at the numbers, and I think that's true not only because we see certain very-important things like housing, healthcare, and education costs outpacing inflation, but because of declines in the quality of many (not all!) goods at nominally-same (inflation adjusted) prices. In fact, I think this is part (in addition to the oft-blamed Baumol's cost disease) of why those important things are outpacing inflation so very much—they can't cut quality as readily or as much as other categories of goods have been able to, so only have actual productivity increases to put downward pressure on their costs, and I think actual productivity increases have been... quite a bit smaller over the last five decades than some figures suggest they are.

I think progress is far more mixed—and that an awful lot of real progress has manifested due to regulation forcing quality above certain levels, in concert with improvements in industry & materials, not solely from productivity increases or better materials. This is a sharply different narrative than the common one, especially since Reagan in US popular culture, and in modern libertarian-influenced discourse that's now fairly influential.

We have better ordinary, bottom-tier ready-made bread than in 1850 because it's illegal to mix in sawdust now, and not only is it illegal, there's a good-enough chance of getting caught and punished that it isn't really a thing any more. We have better housing (to the degree that it is better, which is a mixed bag but I would certainly concede leans overall better) due both to improvements in how we build houses and to new materials, and because legally-required minimum quality is way, way higher than it used to be in a variety of important ways. Cars are very safe mostly because of regulation (they're more reliable largely due to international competition! Market pressure does work, I'm just extremely skeptical that they're as magically-effective, and certainly not as optimally-effective-when-minimally-regulated, as some suppose)

Online has made things more expensive. Returns cost a lot of money. Company is paying $10+ to return an item with returns at 20%. Factor in the exchange processing and shipping.

Dyes make fabric fit differently. Dark shirt will have more weight and less stretch than a lighter colored shirt. If you’re a big company, you have multiple manufacturers making the same line and the pieces will fit differently.

Having a store, you can just try on everything.

There's been a lot of discussion in recent years about how fashion has stabilized over the past couple of decades whereas it used to be that fashion was in constant flux. Can we notice much difference between the typical street clothes of today versus those of a decade or even two decades ago? The clothing styles of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s are all quite different. Perhaps the lower quality means the industry now has a way to guarantee constant product sales so they're no longer pushing fashion trends as hard as they used to.

Trends certainly do still come and go, especially for young women, but overall society seems to have settled into a state of low energy for fashion change.

Might have something to do with "trend forecasting" companies coming into vogue and quickly becoming standard for clothing companies (among others) starting in the '80s, leading to more-conservative offerings. The Articles of Interest podcast had an episode about it, weird and (of late) influential world I had no idea about.

Le Laboureur work shirts can be under $150 at some stores. They are a different style though and have been difficult to find in stock online.

I only recently ordered some so have no direct experience. The durability of the fabric and quality of construction are substantial from everything I've read.

I'm not sure why, but the inflation estimate felt off and inflation calculators get less accurate the further back you go, so I looked up some figures for the 1930s. Turns out that $18 is a decent estimate.

You can absolutely make a thick, hard-wearing shirt for $18 - I am sure someone does indeed make this shirt; most people just want different things. Today's consumer wants clothes that fit nicely, something in fashion, with soft materials and trendy colors and comforting advertising.

I can't point you to a $18 hard-wearing work shirt, but I can point you to something even better: regular Wrangler Rustler jeans from Walmart, $13.98. 100% cotton, thick solid denim, and they look and fit the same as $100 Levis. Even better, for the denim nerds there is a raw denim version, only available online in a boot cut; select the color "rigid" [3].

In another category of heavyweight cloth objects, I can also recommend the "Rothco" canvas duffle bag, $30 [4]. Brand in quotation marks because it seems to be generic Indian military surplus sold under other names as well. The stitching is a bit on the weak side for extreme use but it generally holds up well. If anyone here knows of an even sturdier alternative I would love to hear it.

My checklist: 1) material - must be all natural fiber, 2) weight of material, 3) strength of stitching, 4) type of stitch, 5) reviews that mention serious long-term use. One review by a mechanic/firefighter/etc is worth ten million generic reviews.

Anyone else have tips on quality, long-lasting clothes?

-------------------

I used this very useful site [0] to find a paper discussing household income in 1930 [1] which estimates the mean at around $2900/yr and the median around $2500/yr per "family." 2023 household income is 114.5k/year mean and 80.6k/year median. That is, household income has increased by a factor of 32.2x.

That said, household size has declined from 4.1 to 2.5 from 1930 to 2025, so that is 0.61x the size in 1930, so median individual income is really up by 19.6x. So your $0.79 shirt is today $15 (by median individual income) or $24 (by mean individual income.)

[0] https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1930-1939

[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89043221407&seq=31...

[2] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-2...

-------------------

[3] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wrangler-Rustler-Men-s-and-Big-Me...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XNW1UI

You don't even have to go back that far. I have shirts from Target I bought in the late 2000s/early 2010s that are still in great condition despite regular use. They've outlived plenty of newer clothes. The entire space got enshittified in the last decade especially.

A $4 pair of costco wool socks performs as well as $40 darn toughs.

There's a youtube channel that visits Asian clothing manufacturing expos to get quotes. TLDR the difference between a disposable $10 shirt and durable $100 shirt is like $5 in material and labor. $20-$50 for a $100 jacket and $500 one. It is extremely cheap to make very high quality clothing now, brands just decided to segregate market and capture value according to durability, percieved or actual, and take disgusting margins off the top.

I wonder how much companies spend on branding/advertisement 50 years ago.

A few years ago I got into the hobby of handmade leather goods, like wallets.

One thing that struck me as I learned more about the process was that I could with little training, make a higher quality, hand sewn wallet than even most luxury brands for less money by simply buying more expensive material. Indeed, the wallets I've made are still going strong.

What was also apparent was that I certainly had far less skill than the people constructing those mass market wallets. To be able to operate an industrial sewing machine at speed takes far more skill than learning to saddle stitch by hand. When you stitch by hand you can go quite slowly, and taking the time is the point of a hobby anyway. A sewing machine is slightly worse in quality (but not by a lot) but also scales way better.

If you watch videos of skilled folks sewing together shoes on youtube it's insanely impressive how precise and practiced those folks are!

Back to wallets, most hobbyists will take a very high end and thick piece of leather, cut out the pattern with an exacto knife, skive the parts that need it, hand stitch it with a saddle stitch, then finish the edges. Whereas a mass-produced wallet will often use a blend of leather, synthetic fabric for pocket liners, and be machine stitched, with some other machines used along the way. The hobbyist design is simple and robust, it's just layers of leather thicker than you'd find in a normal wallet.

A mass manufactured wallet, even many luxury ones use thinner pieces of leather and synthetic material and construction methods that are less robust. It's not all about cheapness though, some of these things require extra work. I think a lot of it is about producing a product that looks a specific way, even if it is less durable. For instance some luxury products will use a delicate finish (like a paint) that will look awesome, but just won't last as long as a thick piece of vegetable tan. A thin turned edge can certainly be a failure point as well, and that takes more effort to make! I also have to wonder if these brands intentionally want their items to wear out to encourage people to buy more. I imagine the sort of person who buys a Gucci wallet sees it more as a seasonal status symbol than as an investment.

> Indeed, the wallets I've made are still going strong

I'm confused - I purchase a new leather wallet from a department store (a UK one that has a reputation for quality) about once every ten years. How old are your wallets? Or how quickly did your other wallets wear out?

Wife bought a Saddleback Leather wallet for me. I suspect a grandson will inherit it. I wish I could afford other products of theirs. The leather is thick enough that even if a stitch came out, I figure it'd be worth having repaired.

A wallet that only lasts 10 years seems disposable at this point.

I bought a Saddleback wallet at least 14 years ago, and it's still in pretty good shape. There are a couple of stitches that have broken on the fold, but it's generally ok. Has a nice patina.

Though, it's thick. Really thick. And the card pocket edges are thick enough that they will destroy a credit card in 3 years or so. (Except for the top one on each side, and the hidden slot behind the visible cards.)

I was expecting to use it forever, but between the thickness and just not using nearly as many cards/cash any more, I'll probably give up on it and make a thinner one that's specific to the 3 or 4 cards I use and a stashed bill or two.

(Make because we now have way too much leather because my wife has started making barefoot shoes, and hey stash. Have a really nice leather laptop sleeve now too.)

Same, I've got a few Saddleback pieces including a wallet and it's seen some abuse over the past decade but it's supple and strong with no signs of wearing down anytime soon.

Who knows if their claim of "They'll fight over it when you're dead" is true or not, but can confirm the quality will easily outlast 10 years with no problem.

My question is; Why even have a "wallet" at this point?

My teens use these little things that attach to their phones to hold gym key, debit card and ID.

I use a traditional "wallet" or billfold as my abuelo used to call them, but I am positively a dinosaur using one. Also, the darn thing hurts my back if I leave it in my back pocket while driving/sitting.

Heck, I have been eyeing those crossbody bags or saccoche to hold the things that are in my wallet.

I still use cash for all of my in-person purchases, but I do live in a rural area where cash is still king and you will get discounts for cash because the people can't just ignore the 3-4% markup on credit like more well off communities.

Also if you need to carry more than just a drivers license and a single credit card for your job. Trailers have their own registrations that you don't want people to loosely throw in their pockets, different professions have license requirements you need to have on you, receipts and notes are still important because you don't want to just be giving everyone your personal bank statements with cryptic "Part/product 482302" and no breakdown on the individual charges involved. Same with auctions and stockyards. Also someones phone on a job is way more likely to get lost/dropped/stolen and you don't want all your identification and licensing and registrations and receipts being lost along with your phone, you basically throw away the entire next day or two or more re-obtaining all that and like they say, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

>Also, the darn thing hurts my back if I leave it in my back pocket while driving/sitting.

Not that anyone has ever had to worry about pickpockets in my generation (even criminals aren't as skilled as they were in eras past, I guess), but I've always carried it in a front pocket. I'd lose it a dozen times a month otherwise.

>My question is; Why even have a "wallet" at this point?

There are things I keep in it I need. It's been a long while since anyone mistook me for a teenager.

With handmade wallets, if you can replace the stitching, they will outlive you. It’s really lining and stitching that gives up usually. That’s why hobbyists rarely line and the stitches are usually in a groove and people use waxed synthetic thread.

The oldest are maybe old 5-6 years, but they still look great!

That said depending on how you store it ymmv. If you keep it in the same pocket as your keys you’ll have a different outcome from keeping it in a separate pocket of a bag or just even in its own pocket in your pants.

Fashion over function is most definitely a thing.

But there's also status signaling in having something that you can pass down to your descendants. Of course that signal only transfers to those in the know.

Edit: My childhood friend inherited from her parents (who inherited from their parents) a badge making company that made leather badges for first responders. They went out of business last year and sold off all their leather stock.

It's relatively easy to make a thick leather wallet that will last a couple decades.

It's hard to make a thin leather wallet that will last a couple decades.

Most of the online leather brands that popped-up in the past 20 years are the former, not the latter.

About ten years ago, I started garment sewing because it was a superpower. I could create something that hit two previously exclusive conditions: It fit me properly (tall, long arms) and it was interesting (not the one bland pattern available in my fit).

It gave me a respite from the computer, a nice creative outlet, and was very satisfying. I've made about 140 shirts for myself and others since then, and every one is unique, with wild fabrics not found in any commercial garment. I very much recommend making things for yourself.

The interesting thing is that almost everyone I talk to about it says "you should sell them". Thing is, it takes me about 2-3 afternoons to make a shirt, plus consumables costs (retail $30-40, wholesale would obviously be lower), and scaling the process basically requires scaling the number of people doing it.

So I always respond that I just do it for the benefit of myself, family, and friends, but I have a keen understanding of how much the manufacturers are squeezing costs through labor, materials, and construction techniques to hit that $18 shirt that falls apart in a couple months.

Two people in equation. The brand and the factory. Brand will get bids from the factories. No one owns their factories any more. Factories are always trying to get shit past the brands and brands have QA people at the factories ensure it meets specs.

Cost for a dress cotton shirt with standard fabric(eg: not organic or brand name) will be less than $10. Labor is not that expensive compared to fabric/hardware.

How did you go about learning this? It's something that I've been thinking I might be interested in picking up.

Just start. Most shirt construction is based on a two-piece collar, a yoke, and button front. I started with a cheap pattern (McCalls 2447) that covered those aspects, and started modifying from there, but any dress or sport shirt pattern will give you the same basic construction.

Any machine will do. I had borrowed a cheapo Singer Simple machine from my father in law to make some pillows. Reverse lever broke on my second shirt, made a new one with some D-shaft and coupler from Mcmaster-Carr and still using it.

First shirt was recognizable as a shirt and sort of fit, second shirt was better, and by the third I had mostly dialed things in. Like any skill, practice makes perfect. Mostly sewn woven fabric, except for some TOS tunics with the velour knits. Made a pair of pants that I wasn't happy with and intend to loop back to that one of these days. Thing is, wild fabric is more appropriate for shirts than pants, so that is where I have focused.

My various works https://dave.org/sewing/

Also, don’t know about your area, but my local library will let you checkout a sewing machine.

Hot damn this is inspiring!

Not the commenter you asked but I inherited my mother's sewing machine and decided to make a ball cap by seam ripping apart one that was wearing out but fit really well.

I traced the pieces onto new fabric (waxed cotton) and reused the existing plastic brim insert. It's still in use and I enjoy telling people I made it although there a few things I'd do differently. I watched a few yt videos on constructing a cap for tips on things like machine settings, top stitching, fastenings etc then just winged it after I felt like my theoretical knowledge had plateaued.

It would undoubtedly have been cheaper to buy a new cap, but since I'm unemployed, long term burned out and also newly-diagnosed with ADHD, some things are just gut feeling without making a great deal of sense these days.

Now as things wear out I'm cutting them apart to study the pieces and make new versions. It's surprising what you can make. I just made some quilted slippers for my kid by tracing around his feet and using scrap leather I had lying around. My next project is a pair of trousers. Weirdly, as a recovering perfectionist, I find myself a lot more open to making prototypes and learning from mistakes than I ever was in my career.

So you are able to create better and more lasting clothes because they fit your body better and you likely do better cutting and stitching than commercial products.

How do you ensure that the fabric is high quality enough? Where are you sourcing it from?

Well, that's an interesting question. Most fabric is of sufficient quality, so I select for style and look for bold color. Summer shirts are mostly light cotton, and there are a million places to get that. Quilters and garment sewers are the textile equivalent of Star Wars/Star Trek fandoms and don't cross paths much, but any store catering to quilters is a good place to look for summer shirt fabric.

For winter shirts, I like flannel, and Joann was the best for that, particularly when they would put it on sale for $2.50/yd. I'll miss walking the aisles, scanning a hundred patterns all at once, but will figure something out.

There are plenty of web stores, but it gets tiresome going through patterns one at a time instead of seeing a row of bolts in one glance, but that's where we are at now. Fabric.com used to be the best web store, but amazon bought and destroyed them a couple years ago.

Having favorite designers helps narrow the search a bit. Alexander Henry Fabrics was my absolute first choice for patterns. They did magnificent work, but Marc DeLeon, who was the lead, passed away a few months back and his kids are shutting down the company. Robert Kaufman fabrics and Michael Miller fabrics are two others that have some very fun prints.

One place where quality was an issue was Hobby Lobby. Stopped in to check out their selection when Joanns imploded. They had a nice selection of patterns, but the fabric felt like sandpaper. They also only sold house brand thread rather than Coats or Gutterman. Michael's seems to be expanding their fabric selection in response to recent events as well, so I'm sure the local options will eventually rebound.

How did you get started?

Just decided to do it one day. Had done some utility sewing (bags, pillows, odds and ends) since I was little so knew how to at least thread a machine and straight stitch. As mentioned in a previous comment, shirts mostly have the same basic construction, so I just got a pattern, some fabric, and started trying.

Instructions on patterns are obtusely written, with a lot of extraneous steps about basting and other nonsense that can usually be skipped, but everyone here is an engineer of some sort and should be able to figure it out. You cut out shapes, pin them together so they don't slide around relative to each other, and then sew in a line a fixed distance from the edge (seam allowance, usually 5/8"). Most machines have guide lines that help you maintain that.

There are a few trickier bits, like sewing along curves where fabric is bending two different ways at once (like sleeve/body joints) and using the "burrito technique" to topologically invert the yoke of a shirt for easy sewing, but youtube has plenty of videos to help.

Something I have noticed over the last 20 years: Male underwear. The stuff I used to buy in the 1990's would function until it fell apart because of holes worn in the actual cloth. The stuff I buy now (boxer shorts) appears designed to fall apart. Mainly, the rubber stuff making them elastic breaks down faster than anything else, so in about 12 months, they are horrible to use, because the broken rubber makes them slide off me, in a way that is more impractical than sexy. Given that this was not a problem in the early 2000s, I conclude that some MBA must have optimized them in the meantime. There is probably some brand that costs 4x as much where this isn't a problem - but those I used to buy in the nineties, didn't cost 4 times as much.

Anecdotally I still have some of my high-school underwear and it seems to be outlasting any new underwear I buy!

Another annoyance: some underwear brands put a booklet of long labels exactly between the cheeks.

Some brands have some pretty great ways to avoid this issue. Decathlon stuff tends to have a short piece of fabric the same material as the rest to which the label is sewn. If you use scissors to cut that piece of fabric you're left with a little lip of soft fabric, instead of the sharp edges of a cut label. Muchacho Malo has managed to invent a fabric for their labels where you can easily and without damage tear out the label, leaving no remains of the label at all. I've also been seeing more and more T-shirt brands just straight up print the label on the inside of the shirt, avoiding the issue entirely.

It's definitely still a problem, but I'm seeing slow improvements in the products on offer.

I always buy underwear in Brazil when I visit. My aunt knows where to get the good stuff, those things last for 10 years, easily. I don't even know how much they cost as she makes a point to not let me pay for them :D but they're probably very cheap compared to most places/brands.

I see ZR on it, so I think it's this brand: https://www.zeerucci.com.br/cueca-boxer-sem-cost-3439?srslti...

The ones I get in Europe and Australia literally have holes in them after two or three usages, even more expensive ones, it's just a joke. Same thing with jeans... how can they not last longer than a few months???? My old Brazilian jeans from the 1990's still look in perfect shape, if only I could wear them without looking like outdated by 30 years. I still keep them anyway, waiting for the very-lose-jeans fit to come back one day!

Most modern jeans include a percentage of elastane (lycra), which makes them both more comfortable and more susceptible to wear damage.

Weirdly, American Eagle, yes the teenager brand, makes really good boxer shorts.

Socks are horrendous, they don't last more than a year. I only noticed this 3-4 years ago. This didn't seem to be a problem for the 45+ years I wore socks before then.

What if you handwash them? Do you think it would last longer? As in, do you think it has to do with the washing machine (and quality)?

Wouldn't that only be relevant if the old ones weren't also machine-washed? Also, what % of people in developed countries are handwashing their underpants? The only semi-widespread handwashing I'm aware of in developed nations are for wool sweaters and sometimes women's bras.

Lots of the modern world still line-dries laundry, but this is exceedingly uncommon in the USA.

Line drying was not common in the 1990s (in the US) when the claim is underwear lasted. Washing machines have switch to low water use versions, so that might be a factor (I doubt it, but it the only other thing I can think of)

Line-drying is very different from "hand-washing".

I "line-dry" (drying rack) a lot of my clothes (pretty much all my dress pants, dress shirts, anything that I don't want shrinking in a hot dryer). But I don't use a bucket or tub to handwash and handwring my clothes; I still machine-wash on delicate with cold water even if I line dry. I've never met anyone who hand washes, in any country (though I know it's popular in many less-developed nations, I haven't met anyone who does).

I have occasionally handwashed very expensive wool sweaters, but I prefer dry-cleaning them, not only because of the labor but also because if I let them soak even just a little too long the wool fibers start separating and permanently changes the sweater.

On this thought also dryer settings (high vs low heat) can play a big part especially with synthetic materials like elastics degrading faster than expected.

there was an 'arms race' in detergent strength throughout the 2000s. modern detergent contains more specialised enzymes, is more concentrated, and is more effective - but is (reportedly) much harder on the lifespan of garments

The main thesis of the article is that workers in, say, Cambodia are not inherently worse at making clothes than workers in a first world country. Which seems to be countering some rhetoric I have never heard (despite being in pretty… mixed circles), as well as patently obvious.

I’m not even sure what the point of the article is, given that someone racist enough to believe that rhetoric is probably not going to read it in the first place

I've actually heard a French fashion student opine that generally speaking, French made garments are better quality than those made in East/South-east/South Asia.

Although she didn't say anything about why this was the case, I imagine she'd agree that it's more to do with French workers having better working conditions and aiming for the higher end of the market, which means they use better materials, rather than some innate superiority of the French that makes the uniquely well-suited to tailoring.

Probably the best single, lazy marker for “is this article of clothing decent-quality?” is whether it’s made with developed-world labor, and the reason is simply that it doesn’t make much sense to pay ultra-expensive labor to make pieces with poor construction and shitty materials, since you’ll end up with not just crap, but expensive crap.

Good stuff’s made almost everywhere, but it takes more diligence to find it from other sources.

I suppose there's the idea that companies outsource to the cheapest possible countries because they want to produce things as cheaply as possible on all counts (not just labor), which is generally contradictory with high quality.

But this is not necessarily the case, at least not per some clothing companies' claims, see for instance "loom" https://la-mode-a-l-envers.loom.fr/, a French clothing company that produces in Portugal (considerably cheaper labor than France and a developed textile industry) despite their main selling point being quality and durability.

It is perfectly conceivable that a company would try to cut costs on labor, while still attempting to produce high quality things. Perhaps not the most common, but not impossible.

I'm Portuguese, and although we have a lot of high quality textiles being produced here and being used by high end designer brands, most Portuguese people are surprised when they see the label.

It's usually a very B2B thing (outdated and vague corporate site, if any) but I've purchased very nice blanks from these factories for very good prices by contacting them directly.

There's also a lot of shoe production, but for this there are well known consumer facing stores so people are more aware.

Yeah totally agree on this. And I think that's should be the example of good product.

Yes, I've never considered worker skill (much less race) to be a factor in the low quality of mass-market items.

The mass production process and target price point seem much more relevant.

That said, mass production processes are also tailored (ahem) to allow specialization - it's doubtful that one person takes the garment from fabric bolts to completed garment as could happen in a bespoke, individual tailor context (though I'm sure custom garments are generally produced by teams of workers as well!)

So individual workers are likely to be very highly skilled in their individual specialty step and equipment, but may not have the range of production and design skill of a master craftsman.

Same goes for electronics. Why is ‘everything’ made in Shenzhen/GBA/China? Skilled labor.

At least for made in the USA garments, the joke is always that the actual labor is still people from the third world, making less than minimum wage- they're just in LA instead of Guatemala.

I took it as more like, people might kinda think to themselves, “this shirt was made by my friend with time and love instead of just, you know, coming off the production line” as if mass produced clothing is just made by some big corporate machine. But of course someone somewhere is actually putting in work to make a shirt for you, always.

I wonder how true this is. There's a lot of machine sewing, done by humans, to make more complicated articles of clothing (for example a dress, or a pair of trousers), and doubtless that won't be mechanised even though it could be because humans are cheaper to retrain. Your basic little black dress will be hand made, maybe by a person you know, maybe by near slave labour, but humans made that.

But say socks, the actual garment manufacture is entirely mechanical, thread goes in, machine works, socks come out. There are a bunch of human processes we add, including a QA step (the machine doesn't care if it makes occasional non-socks, a QA can see that's not a sock and dispose of it or summon maintenance if the machine starts to do this a lot) but so far as I can see the socks are made by the machine.

The boundary between machine and hand is fundamentally nebulous. Saying that we add human process feels like a backwards framing here. People do QA on things done by hand. People feed yarn into their own needles. The current process for knitwear manufacturing is basically the same as it was 200 years ago, but we have removed humans to the greatest extent possible. However with socks or yardage people are constantly operating on the machines. Someone needs to feed the yarn and patch it when it snaps. The boundary between hand and machine is just nebulous but every single step of the way has human hands.

Yes, socks, but nothing else is: underwear, t-shirts, jeans... all sewn by hand.

No it's not, a major technological advancement was a machine that sews for you, there is very little hand sewing done any more. The second perhaps more important technological tour de force were the weaving machines, there is even less hand weaving than there is hand sewing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom

The problem with the term "hand-made" is how vague it is, you would not a call a car "hand made" even though most of the parts are put together by hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTZ3rJHHSik (Model T Ford Assembly Line) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQPFVouph-w (honda factory tour) here are two car assembly lines 100 years apart notice how many people are still required to do final assembly.

Personally I think the sewing machine was a trickier problem than the weaving machine, We take them for granted today but it took 100 years and a real stroke of genius to figure out how to invert the process in order to make it simple enough for a machine to do it. while weaving has always utilized complex machines to make it possible.

Like your parent, I would consider that cars are, in the same sense, "hand made" both including the small runs of luxury cars (which are "hand made" in the sense where parts might not fit properly because the panel was made by Steve on Monday morning, and he got the measurements a bit wrong) and a generic mid-range SUV that Ford churned out in huge numbers where a "production line" still has humans working on every vehicle, even though they have machines to help them do a consistent job.

We should distinguish two kinds of weaving machine, fortunately my sister is a textile artist so I have to hand exactly the best examples. A few minutes walk from her home is Saltaire, which today is a tourist attraction but was historically economically important. Titus Salt's mill, for which the village provides housing and so on, had the second kind of weaving machine. The Mill produced fabric much like you'd see today, yards and yards of identical material woven at incredible speed.

But for centuries before such mills were built, the first kind of weaving machine had existed. You won't see many in use today, some kinds of University might show them to students, a few museums have one that can be demonstrated. But on the Outer Hebrides there are lots, and that's because Harris Tweed is specifically required to be made this way, on those islands, the same way Champagne has to be made in a specific way in a particular region of France.

It is in principle possible for humans to literally weave fabrics by hand, but it's ridiculously laborious, so the first machine (the one used to make Harris Tweed) makes a lot of sense. But if we're going to (and ordinarily people do) insist this counts as Hand Weaving then it seems also reasonable to say that operating a sewing machine to make a pair of jeans is also hand making clothes.

[Edited to simplify + clarify last sentence]

I obviously meant sewn by hand, using a sewing machine. Not by a robot. The fabric is cut and passed through a machine by a human.

My understanding is this is because the hardest problem in robotics is handling fabric, and we’ve yet to build robots that are any good at it.

Fabric stretches. That makes it very hard to accurately handle. A size 6 dress needs to be the same size and fit as every other size 6 dress from your brand since if someone likes one they might buy more. (there is no need to be the same as someone else's size 6, but it needs to match your other size 6s)

Right, it’s like if paper was really stretchy and had tissue-paper like qualities of wanting to bunch up and fold, and you tried to make a printer. We all know how much of a struggle it can be to get paper to consistently feed without it being stretchy or wanting to bunch up…

But then also you need to make origami with it, not just print.

To some degree, paper does have those characteristics --- when one is folding it for binding, which is why books printed in signatures are more expensive, and actual sewn signatures even more so.

Being unable to find underwear that properly suited me, I tried making my own clothes a while back.

The experience was hugely humbling, and completely robbed me of any belief I had in the idea that "hard work pays off" - the person who made my pants probably works 12 hours a day, 6 days in a week in an awful sweatshop, producing garments of a quality I couldn't hope to approximate, and is paid a few dollars a day, while I have a cushy, well paid dev job where I work a fraction of those hours and get paid a few orders of magnitude more.

A friend did (correctly) remark that this was due to programming skills being rarer and more valuable than sewing skills, and this is true, but I remain highly suspicious of anyone suggesting that "work harder" is a route to riches.

Work hard is one element of success. It is not the only one, but it is very important.

What you work on matters. The proverbial poor starving artist works very hard - but not on something society values and so they don't make much money. Many great jobs require working very hard in school but once you graduate you can coast along doing much less hard work. Even if you work equally hard in school as someone else, different areas of study mean you can expect to earn different amounts.

Luck is also a factor but you cannot control that.

> Luck is also a factor but you cannot control that.

I agree, but making choices which increase exposure to opportunity is often lumped-in with "luck".

Agree. As a programmer that likes to sew in her free time; I do think it is significantly easier to pick 10 random people of the street and make them into excellent sewists within a year than to make them into good programmers.

Programming is harder and more specialized, but it's not harder work.

It's a sigmoid. If you are rich, hard work is unnecessary, if you are broke, hard work is insufficient. In the middle, work ethic has some gradient to it.

Work isn't the only argument to the success function, luck and smarts are in there too. But without the work you need a shit ton more luck and smarts.

I suggest looking into a phenomenon called "unequal exchange". Turns out that officially ending colonialism and actually ending it are two very different things. Your programming skills aren't just paid more because they are rarer, it is because we exploit the global South on a large scale.

The most blatant example of this I came across recently was this website, Asket, who sell clothing but are also fully transparent about their pricing. This is admirable, but also completely turned me off of buying anything from them: it costs them 43 dollars to create and import a pair of jeans, which they then sell for 170. Their value-add in this chain is a website and instagram ads, while the company who actually created the garment gets 29$.

I'm not sure this is entirely true, most textile factory workers could probably not just tailor and sew a shirt, they do exactly one part of a design, like a single zipper, and then hand it to the next person, much like anyone working in a factory.

Kudos for trying to make clothes for yourself. I feel everyone should do that at some point.

It stuns me that anyone ever believed in that myth.

"Mass-produced clothing is low quality when someone overseeing the project decided to make it low quality. Mass-produced clothing is high quality when someone overseeing the project decided to make it high quality."

Now change "Mass-produced clothing" to "commercial software".

It's not entirely inaccurate, but it's an unfair comparison to equate a highly engineered product with one that isn't. In shirt manufacturing, inputs and their impact on output quality are well understood, unlike in highly engineered products that involve many contributors.

Are you saying a piece of clothing designed to be mass-produced is not highly engineered and doesn't involve many contributors?

By the usual definitions of highly engineered, nope, it's not. In today's term it is a low-complexity commodity/consumer good. Sure, multiple hands may touch it during the manufacturing process but its low complexity even with machines involved. Each step can be measured and the combined product does not have multiple workflows going into it.

A highly engineered good would a jet engine, an MRI machine or similar. Multiple teams, steps that may be hard to measure and perhaps quality output that may not be fully measured until the end product is put together.

Not sure why you would think otherwise.

It is not a disagreement with the idea but its definitely not a good apples to apples comparison. I guess it fits well with certain narratives people love.

I worked at a well-known multi-national sportswear manufacturer, programming on their product lifecycle management interfacing with logistics, manufacturing, design, marketing, the whole works.

Please believe me when I say these items are highly engineered, from start to finish.

To address your specific assertion, "the combined product does not have multiple workflows going into it", not a single piece of clothing comes off the assembly line without having multiple teams globally coordinating every step along the way.

I think we might be talking past each other due to different definitions of "highly engineered." I’ve got some touch in this space too, family in textile manufacturing, and I’ve seen firsthand what goes into setting up and running these operations.

Yes, there are many teams involved: design, sourcing, logistics, etc., and coordination is non-trivial. But when I say "not highly engineered," I’m speaking in relative terms-compared to something like a jet engine, semiconductor fab, or an MRI machine, where you have interlocking systems, deep R&D, and layers of complex subsystems that are difficult to validate in isolation.

Textiles are complex in a logistical and operational sense, but not in the same way. With some capital, a motivated team can spin up a factory making garments. That’s just not possible with truly high engineering products.

So I don’t disagree that a lot of work goes into it, just that the comparison feels off. We’re evaluating "complexity" on different planes. Software is not an semiconductor fab but its also not a textile plant.

Industrial knitting machines can make entire garments without human involvement, but a person will probably still fold it and sew a label onto it.

In theory yes but very few patterns can be made like this and the cost of such machines is not favorable. Often a linking machine or a cut and sew stage is needed and this is far more hand powered than anything else.

I'm in a state of rather abject panic about clothing.

I used to be content with a very limited wardrobe of old pants, concert tees, and thrift store scores. One of the best ways to pretend that I wasn't unmarried, homeless and mentally ill was having impeccable hygiene and knowing how to put together an outfit.

I've been purchasing at retail (new clothes aren't doused in perfume, starts with less damage, and you get that freedom of choice) but it's appalling how bad the quality is, and are they truly designed to fall apart at a touch? I go for outdoors/athletic type fashion and honestly wouldn't want to work out, play a sport, or go on a nature hike with these flimsy rags, but the sticker shock is real!

Mom always warned me to choose low-maintenance clothes but now I'm beholden to Wash & Fold services, because of several reasons. And I now understand the hysterical reviews that say they ruined garments, because it is not always accidental. And when I presented garments for repair to the same place, they contrived a way to perform the repair accurately, earning their fees, and also completely ruin the garment in the process.

So I need to consider my clothing like my electronics and computers: repair is typically impossible and replacement is the only sane option. Also, never trust a commercial outfit for maintenance of your things and keep it personal, because there's no sucker quite like the guy who doesn't know how to fix his computers or wash his clothes.

few things are more enervating to an engineer than buying clothing or food. Everything is a scam to hide what you are actually buying. In the USA you can even advertise acrylic as "silk".

As a proud son of a garment maker and sewing machine mechanic of a dad, I personally spread more yardage than anyone can remotely comprehend... this was a fantastic read.

Regardless, no mass-produced clothing ever fits me. If I had the money, I'd have my stuff tailor-made.

You can take off-the-shelf clothes to your local tailor to have it tailored to your body. It cost ~$10-15 per garment. A lot less expensive then tailor-making an entire garment.

>You can take off-the-shelf clothes to your local tailor to have it tailored to your body. It cost ~$10-15 per garment.

Unless you're referring to historical prices, I'm not sure where those numbers are coming from. For US/UK prices, good tailoring of something RTW, if it can be done at all, would cost at least 10 times that amount; even something as simple as hemming trousers could cost more that that. And some things are not usually altered, eg, even bespoke shirtmakers usually make new shirts with adjustments after doing fittings rather than altering ones they have made.

My dad was sent to some developing country on a business trip. While there he bought a tailor made suit for fairly cheap - he wore that suit every day for several decades. It was more comfortable than the jeans/t-shirt most people wear.

I don't remember which country, but I'm pretty sure we would call it a developed country today so probably not worth going there today. Still if you get an opportunity to travel you can find tailors in some countries that do great work for cheap. (and also rip offs that do terrible work for high prices)

I really appreciate the sentiment of the article. I am always annoyed when colleagues say that clothing is made by robots or something like that. To the extent that textiles can b automated they have been automated. A wool sweater has a lot of steps each of which involve a mixture of advanced power tools and human hands. A few things to add to the author's points: the 70s-90s mark the big change in clothing with the phasing in of the multi-fiber agreement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Fibre_Arrangement). This basically opened the door for outsourcing of garment manufacture from 1st world to 3rd world countries. It also meant the end of the first world textiles industry, and a serious drop in quality. To a certain extent this might have been an inevitable measure, but that also feels like a cop out for the ability of the most influential group of people in history to make policy decisions.

Something that kind of annoys me about the author's take is that while they profess a lot of empathy for the third world workers who are being (heavily) exploited in textile manufacturing (which is terrible), they don't mention their first world neighbors who were also put out of a job by such outsourcing arrangements. The author is correct that people elsewhere are just as capable as people here, but there is more too it than that. Outsourcing is/was inspired by a desire for lower costs and higher margins, but it is a very anti-social way to achieve these goals. The problem with outsourcing arrangements is that the decision makers cared about cost more than anything else and they had a lot of contempt for the people doing the actual work. Naturally these forces combine to lower the quality. It is easy for the modern left in America to see this contempt for labor as racism when it happens in foreign countries, but they don't seem to see that this same animosity is applied to their neighbors. This feels a bit callous and I think this misses the bigger point that when we devalue work and when we devalue craftsmanship we get lousy outcomes.

DARPA made an half-assed attempt to solve this: "Clothes Will Sew Themselves" - https://www.wired.com/2012/06/darpa-sweatshop/

Somewhat similar someone has a method to laser print(?) eye lash extensions rather than by hand. I'm excited to see what will happen, price drops and quick to iterate, maybe people will chose boring, maybe more cyberpunk - https://www.tiktok.com/@lashbase_jamie/video/748400114988484...

If you want tariffs and NGOs and politics, Europe's only way left to control countries like Cambodia and Chinese influence is duties on garments.

Like the US their NGO's haven't nation built for a decade, they lost to China a while ago and can't claw it back, this is the last of their power -

https://www.rfa.org/english/cambodia/2024/12/02/cambodia-tar...

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