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All clothing is handmade (2022)

162 points by panic 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
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tialaramex 2y ago
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.
- rvense 2y ago
  Yes, socks, but nothing else is: underwear, t-shirts, jeans... all sewn by hand.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    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.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      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)
      - alabastervlog 2y ago
        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.
        WillAdams 2y ago
        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.
  - somat 2y ago
    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/Sewing_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTZ3rJHHSik (Model T Ford Assembly Line) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQPFVouph-w 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.
    - rvense 2y ago
      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.
    - tialaramex 2y ago
      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]
- blululu 2y ago
  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.
aaron695 2y ago
DARPA made an half-assed attempt to solve this: "Clothes Will Sew Themselves" - https://www.wired.com/2012/06/darpa-sweatshop/ 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/7484001149884845334 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-tariff-preferences/ https://www.rfa.org/english/cambodia/2024/12/02/cambodia-tar...
arijun 2y ago
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
- achenet 2y ago
  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.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    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.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - MITSardine 2y ago
    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/ 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.
alabastervlog 2y ago
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.
- seper8 2y ago
  I am looking for the same. Some kind of consumer report for quality, threadcount, washing machine resistance, etc...
  - intrasight 2y ago
    Consumer Reports could conceivably do this. But not easily.
- api 2y ago
  > 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.
achenet 2y ago
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.
- delichon 2y ago
  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.
- bluGill 2y ago
  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.
  - acuozzo 2y ago
    > 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".
- dekleinewolf 2y ago
  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.
andrewvc 2y 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.
- intrasight 2y ago
  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.
1970-1-1 2y ago
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".
cratermoon 2y ago
"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".
- infecto 2y ago
  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.
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    Are you saying a piece of clothing designed to be mass-produced is not highly engineered and doesn't involve many contributors?
    - infecto 2y ago
      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.
      - cratermoon 2y ago
        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.
aeneasmackenzie 2y ago
Industrial knitting machines can make entire garments without human involvement, but a person will probably still fold it and sew a label onto it.
- blululu 2y ago
  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.
zombot 2y ago
Regardless, no mass-produced clothing ever fits me. If I had the money, I'd have my stuff tailor-made.
- GarnetFloride 2y ago
  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.
  - cge 2y ago
    >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.
- bluGill 2y ago
  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)
fifticon 2y ago
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.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  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)?
  - reaperman 2y ago
    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.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - jrmg 2y ago
      Lots of the modern world still line-dries laundry, but this is exceedingly uncommon in the USA.
      - reaperman 2y ago
        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.
squeedles 2y ago
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.
- asyx 2y ago
  How did you get started?
  - squeedles 2y ago
    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.
- 2y ago
blululu 2y ago
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 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.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
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.
rekttrader 2y ago
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.

162 points by panic 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

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.

rvense 2y ago
Yes, socks, but nothing else is: underwear, t-shirts, jeans... all sewn by hand.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  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.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    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)
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      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.
      - WillAdams 2y ago
        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.
- somat 2y ago
  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/Sewing_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTZ3rJHHSik (Model T Ford Assembly Line) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQPFVouph-w 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.
  - rvense 2y ago
    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.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    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]
blululu 2y ago
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.

aaron695 2y ago

DARPA made an half-assed attempt to solve this: "Clothes Will Sew Themselves" - https://www.wired.com/2012/06/darpa-sweatshop/ 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/7484001149884845334 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-tariff-preferences/ https://www.rfa.org/english/cambodia/2024/12/02/cambodia-tar...

arijun 2y ago

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

achenet 2y ago
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.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  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.
- deleted 2y ago
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- MITSardine 2y ago
  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/ 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.

alabastervlog 2y ago

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.

seper8 2y ago
I am looking for the same. Some kind of consumer report for quality, threadcount, washing machine resistance, etc...
- intrasight 2y ago
  Consumer Reports could conceivably do this. But not easily.
api 2y ago
> 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.

achenet 2y ago

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.

delichon 2y ago
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.
bluGill 2y ago
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.
- acuozzo 2y ago
  > 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".
dekleinewolf 2y ago
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.

andrewvc 2y 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.

intrasight 2y ago
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.

1970-1-1 2y ago

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".

cratermoon 2y ago

"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".

infecto 2y ago
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.
- cratermoon 2y ago
  Are you saying a piece of clothing designed to be mass-produced is not highly engineered and doesn't involve many contributors?
  - infecto 2y ago
    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.
    - cratermoon 2y ago
      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.

aeneasmackenzie 2y ago

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

blululu 2y ago
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.

zombot 2y ago

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

GarnetFloride 2y ago
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.
- cge 2y ago
  >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.
bluGill 2y ago
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)

fifticon 2y ago

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.

johnisgood 2y ago
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)?
- reaperman 2y ago
  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.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - jrmg 2y ago
    Lots of the modern world still line-dries laundry, but this is exceedingly uncommon in the USA.
    - reaperman 2y ago
      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.

squeedles 2y ago

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.

asyx 2y ago
How did you get started?
- squeedles 2y ago
  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.
2y ago

blululu 2y ago

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 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.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

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.

rekttrader 2y ago

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.