Somewhat related: has anyone done a study of inflation in terms of clothing <i>adjusted for quality</i>? 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.<p>I’ve long suspected a lot of supposed economic progress since, especially, the 1970s, has just been goods getting worse.<p>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.<p>If you find one under $150, please let me know.<p>Similar story for jeans, sweatshirts… everything. Hell, even athletic socks were better-made decades ago.<p>[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 <i>terrible</i> now. This is why I suspect there’s some bullshit going on with the metrics, and it involves laundering (ha!) worse goods into alleged <i>improvements</i> 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.
A few years ago I got into the hobby of handmade leather goods, like wallets.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If you watch videos of skilled folks sewing together shoes on youtube it's insanely impressive how precise and practiced those folks are!<p>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.<p>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.
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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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 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.<p>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.
Being unable to find underwear that properly suited me, I tried making my own clothes a while back.<p>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.<p>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.
"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."<p>Now change "Mass-produced clothing" to "commercial software".
I'm in a state of rather abject panic about clothing.<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>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.
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 (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Fibre_Arrangement" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Fibre_Arrangement</a>). 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.<p>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" - <a href="https://www.wired.com/2012/06/darpa-sweatshop/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2012/06/darpa-sweatshop/</a><p>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 - <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@lashbase_jamie/video/7484001149884845334" rel="nofollow">https://www.tiktok.com/@lashbase_jamie/video/748400114988484...</a><p>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.<p>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 -<p><a href="https://www.rfa.org/english/cambodia/2024/12/02/cambodia-tariff-preferences/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rfa.org/english/cambodia/2024/12/02/cambodia-tar...</a>