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"Not terribly high," I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. It seems pretty high to me. Also you have

"Not terribly high," I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. It seems pretty high to me. Also you have to get pretty high up into the luxury market before you'll find a suit that costs $7,000. Armanis are synonymous with luxury suits in the public consciousness and they top out at $4,000, according to their website. The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them. They come from the fact that they are luxury items -- it's the exclusivity and signaling that you're paying for. For more on this phenomenon see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

dharmab 5y ago
> I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. Wedding dresses?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  Normal people don't buy $7,000 wedding dresses. Hell, even a lot of rich people don't.
  - V99 5y ago
    The 'lower end of that range' is $500, and you'll definitely spend that if you're buying a wedding dress.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them. That's not entirely true, especially when it comes to haute couture. For example, clothes made by a French fashion house may take tens/hundreds of hours to make, at Western European salaries. Yes, agreed, the markup puts the cost into the stratosphere, but the point is that clothes made like this would need to cost thousands of dollars at minimum just to cover the labor (instead of the tens of thousands they sell for). I interpreted the parent's comment of "not terribly high" as meaning not terribly high when compared to modern day clothes that take a similar amount of labor. When you think about it, the amount of manual labor that would need to go into a tunic (shearing wool or picking cotton, washing and spinning the fibers, weaving the cloth, sewing and cutting the garment) is enormous without modern day machines. The reason stuff like fast fashion today is so cheap is not just that it's put together in poor countries (though that's obviously part of it), but that the total amount of labor that goes into something like a shirt or dress is in the the ~10-15 minute range, not the 30-40 hour range.
- naniwaduni 5y ago
  Clothes made by a French fashion house don't cost a lot because they're labor-intensive to make: they're labor-intensive to make because that costs a lot.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Very useful things like big nuclear power plants and subways face somewhat similar issues, though of course the starting point has more unavoidable difficulty.

dharmab 5y ago

> I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. Wedding dresses?

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
Normal people don't buy $7,000 wedding dresses. Hell, even a lot of rich people don't.
- V99 5y ago
  The 'lower end of that range' is $500, and you'll definitely spend that if you're buying a wedding dress.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

> The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them. That's not entirely true, especially when it comes to haute couture. For example, clothes made by a French fashion house may take tens/hundreds of hours to make, at Western European salaries. Yes, agreed, the markup puts the cost into the stratosphere, but the point is that clothes made like this would need to cost thousands of dollars at minimum just to cover the labor (instead of the tens of thousands they sell for). I interpreted the parent's comment of "not terribly high" as meaning not terribly high when compared to modern day clothes that take a similar amount of labor. When you think about it, the amount of manual labor that would need to go into a tunic (shearing wool or picking cotton, washing and spinning the fibers, weaving the cloth, sewing and cutting the garment) is enormous without modern day machines. The reason stuff like fast fashion today is so cheap is not just that it's put together in poor countries (though that's obviously part of it), but that the total amount of labor that goes into something like a shirt or dress is in the the ~10-15 minute range, not the 30-40 hour range.

naniwaduni 5y ago
Clothes made by a French fashion house don't cost a lot because they're labor-intensive to make: they're labor-intensive to make because that costs a lot.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Very useful things like big nuclear power plants and subways face somewhat similar issues, though of course the starting point has more unavoidable difficulty.