Got it. But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s?
Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.
Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.
They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive.
The combination of customer expectation for low prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.
I feel for them because I wouldn't mind paying 2/3 times the price for something of measurably higher quality and durability, but it takes effort and dedication to accomplish that as a customer. Effectively the market is saturated with premium-branded items that are marginally better or sometimes worse (a lot of what you see as "technical clothing" comes across that way at least), you feel gaslit by marketing, fake reviews and astroturfing campaigns, and there are only so many deceptions, defeats and financial losses you can sustain before going back to the devil you know: the default everyone else is buying.
Yes, that's true and IMO the main reason why even people with the money end up buying the same bad products: they often don't have the time to learn and form a taste.
* Naked and Famous (Canada): https://nakedandfamousdenim.com. They also have a cheaper brand that uses the same Japanese denim but the garments are made in China (https://theunbrandedbrand.com), which is still better than Levi's.
* 3Sixteen (US): https://www.3sixteen.com
* The Flat Head (Japan): https://privateandco.ca/collections/the-flat-head
* SugarCane (Japan): https://sugarcanejeans.com/
* TCB (Japan): https://tcbjeans.myshopify.com/
Most of the Japanese brands are hard to get outside Japan, and flying to Tokyo is often the best way to get one, otherwise you're stuck with buying online but you have to know well what you're doing because Japanese denim is almost always unwashed, meaning it will shrink after use so you really have to know how much higher a size to order so that it will fit you well after 6 months.
Clothing prices have been kept flat more by making the products worse. Cheaper synthetic blends, lower stitch count, thinner fabrics, .. and of course by making them in cheaper places with cheaper labor and fewer laws..
My TradingView (Yearly) model for the phenomenon: 23.05*10^12/M2SL*A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100))
A4102C1Q027SBEA is total US wages/salaries,
A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100)) attempts to get a rough average of individual wage/salary,
23.05*10^12/M2SL normalizes the time series to today's Dollar value (in M2 terms).