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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

This is far more prominent in women’s clothing. My wife always says how buying from the same brands over the years that materials get thinner and thinner, as well as becoming more and more synthetic blend %s until it’s practically disposable.

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I have noticed that woman’s clothing seems incredibly poor quality a lot of the time. Incredibly thin, and just looking at stuff on the racks and stores it was extremely common to find minor defects and loose threads.

Part of it may be matching to the use case.

Men will buy a shirt and wear it until its seams break in 2-10 years.

Women will buy blouses or dresses with cuts/colors that only work in certain seasons to be worn for a specific occasion that won’t come to pass again soon.

Now where women have more trouble is just in the utility work wear shopping space because that clothing is utilized frequently and until it fails.

So many people of HN need to google the terms “raw denim” and “selvedge denim”. Companies like naked and famous make high quality BIFL tier work wear clothes aimed at women.

Normies just don’t know about it cus denim heads are autistic.

I think even normies know about the selvedge denim. But where are the quality tee shirt, Oxford, polo, etc pieces that don’t fall apart in 2 years?

Gustin makes them, also wash on cold and hang dry.

Normies do NOT know about selvedge/raw denim at all.

This is the way I’ve been treating my clothes for years. I still have clothes that would’ve been thrown away a decade ago, but now they’re my favorite, softest shirts.

LuLuLemon is guilty of this. Their quality was pretty good about 10 years ago, but since then all the materials have gotten thinner and less durable. I have some LuLuLemon clothes from 10+ years ago which outlasted things I bought 3 years ago.

Now the quality is objectively bad and things get holes right away or are not even tailored correctly, but hey $7 billion wasn’t enough for Chip Wilson so he is going to keep sucking the brand dry.

Lulu also fell prey to a typical pattern of building a brand on quality, at a higher price point for higher income consumer. Then as they grew and targeted the broader market, getting copied by low cost competitors and then trying to pivot to compete with them.

You see similar in NYC with fast casual / quick service type places that scale from 2-3 locations into a national chain. Stuff becomes less handmade, less fresh, ingredient quality goes down, all the care&attention gets optimized away into a sad bowl of slop.

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