7 ms·

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 r

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.
- hgomersall 2y ago
  The problem now is that paying a high price doesn't imply quality.
kasey_junk 2y ago
How do you know they were better made back then? This is a place where you have to be extremely aware of survivor bias. You also have to be very careful about inflation adjusted dollars vs actual wealth values. For instance the median income in the US in 1933 was between $500 and $1000. Inflation adjusted that’s between 15 and 30k but our median income now is much higher than that. Anecdotally my grandmother felt she was wealthy compared to her peers in the 1930s because her family could buy a dress per person per year from the Sears catalog.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  We have both real examples of specific common models, and depictions (photos, sales art) of same, and not just ones regarded as “high end” (which, we’re talking outdoor workwear in an age when that wasn’t remotely fashionable like it would be after the 1950s, so there weren’t really fancy versions of these) and the fabric is better, and the construction more involved and durable, than that in an $50+ chambray shirt today. For a (supposedly) inflation-adjusted $18. Most of the examples I’ve found that approach the originals in quality are $200 or more. I want to know if anyone tracks one down for less than $150, because I’d likely own 2-3 of them before the year’s out if they do. 8x the supposedly inflation-adjusted price of the original would be, from what I can tell, a bargain. Your note that a dress per year felt like a lot is exactly my point: if I had to pay $150 per blue-collar work shirt I’d feel like I was doing pretty great if I could responsibly buy a couple per year. IOW, buying similar quality goods, our alleged improvements in QOL are significantly diminished. [edit] if you look into what decently-constructed (not even finely-made! Just, like, not shit) dresses made with fabrics that aren’t mostly or entirely plastic cost, they’re hundreds of dollars today, even for fairly simple ones, especially midi-length or longer (as there’s more fabric than in a mini)
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    > a dress per year Also keep in mind that the quality and durability of that dress, and similarly-priced clothing of the era, made it possible to not need to buy new every season. That dress could be expected to last for years, longer with simple repairs. Also, shoes are even worse than clothing for declining price/decreasing quality.
gosub100 2y ago
Has cotton become more expensive in the last 90 years? What about labor? I'm sorry for being lazy, I don't have time right now to research. I just want to bring up the point that a lot can change in almost a century. So just doing an inflation-adjusted price comparison is not that helpful.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Oh, I don’t think it’s so much that: I think, rather, that improvements in economic productivity have been wildly overstated, especially since the 1970s, and instead we’ve been seeing a lot of our “improvements” in the form of goods getting worse. IOW inflation in terms of same-quality goods from the early or mid 20th century is a ton higher than our ordinary inflation rate, and much (not all!) of our “productivity improvements” are actually goods getting worse—inflation’s only as low as it is because we’re treating worse goods as comparable to better ones.
  - thehappypm 2y ago
    I think this thread is conflating "quality going down" and "low-cost tier getting cheaper and more popular." Look at Ikea. They sell a wooden table with four chairs for $199 (Hagernas). $199 for a place for a family of four to eat on new furniture, and it looks all right! That is a remarkable amount of value. Even if that won't last forever, high-quality stuff has always been expensive; like any dining set that anyone would consider "quality" would be at least $1000 new, or the cost of five of these Ikea sets. So I guess my point is that the Dust Bowl farmers who had nice furniture maybe only had that because they didn't have a choice; maybe they would have preferred to save that money or buy clothes or better food but they really had no low-end options. And having that choice for an Ikea table would have actually made them richer, not poorer.
    - gosub100 2y ago
      Another factor is reluctance to repair. When a plastic laminated particle board breaks, virtually nobody wants to fix it. I don't personally know how, but it's not impossible. For whatever reason, simple repair skills have massively deteriorated in later generations.
mtreis86 2y ago
> If you find one under $150, please let me know. Gustin has a couple shirts that fit the profile, for instance this triple-stitched 11oz workshirt for $114 https://www.weargustin.com/store/shirts-168-italy-dark-oak-workshirt https://www.weargustin.com/store/shirts-168-italy-dark-oak-w...
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Hahaha, I admit I posted in part to get the “HN is better than Google at finding things, as long as you claim it can’t be done” effect :-) Not quite the fabric I had in mind, but those look damn good, really close style-wise, and are on the short-list for the next time I sit down to look over my next batch of clothing purchases. Thanks!
- WillAdams 2y ago
  Crowd-funded, not available for direct order/purchase.
  - jwagenet 2y ago
    I doubt the sears catalog shirt was made by the thousands sitting on warehouse shelves.
    - WillAdams 2y ago
      The Five Brothers Shirt which I was gifted when I was down on my luck and just out of the service was made in a quantity which allowed a friend's aunt to purchase 4 of them as gifts for all the younger folks at her Christmas party that year, and there were quite a few on the sales floor at Sears when my folks took me school clothes shopping each year. They are still in business, but I wonder what changed when the last time I looked at their shirts, they were north of $150, and now they are quite competitive in price, and I worry about the quality as is being debated in this thread. Still have that shirt, four decades later, and still wear it around the house, though it's a bit frayed from rough work chopping and hauling firewood when I was younger.
adregan 2y ago
Would a Filson[0] fit the bill ($145)? It’s 5oz. material (what weight are you targeting?). Anecdotally, I wear a wool coat from Filson that is nearly 20 years old. Halfway through its life they reconstructed the fraying cuffs for free. 0: https://www.filson.com/products/chambray-cpo-shirt-rinsed-indigo-chambray https://www.filson.com/products/chambray-cpo-shirt-rinsed-in...
- devin 2y ago
  Filson’s quality has continued to decline over the years.
  - devin 2y ago
    Just to be clear: Filson is still "good" quality for the price IMO, but vintage Filson is built like a tank. My button down shirts from 15 years ago have never even needed a button replaced, whereas newer shirt construction from Bangladesh does not seem as strong to me. Material quality is better/heavier for my older shirts. I'm not sure if they scrapped it, but somewhat recently (a year ago?) I saw that they were trying to facilitate sales of vintage Filson through their site presumably because they see the people who care about quality buying vintage Filson on eBay instead of the newer stuff they're selling. Also, while it's certainly not the case that "made overseas = lesser quality", Filson's website has a prominently displayed filter/category for "Made in the USA". This is where you can get a really heavy knit sweater for $500 that IMO is worthy of the old Filson name.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    This is the same story with everything. Companies all want to take as much as they can possibly squeeze out of you while giving you as little as they can get away with. A few companies start out by charging higher prices for higher quality, often pricing out a large number of consumers, but eventually the greed wins out and they start to cut corners too. If you're wealthy enough to keep chasing after luxury goods you'll be ripped off at a slower pace than most, but eventually you'll be increasingly disappointed in what you're getting and have to look harder and harder, and pay higher and higher prices for anything nice. The poorest people are stuck paying increasing prices for poisonous products that are basically trash and that's all they can barely afford.
blululu 2y ago
This is a good question and this is definitely happening but it's not clear how big a percentage of purchased goods fall into this category. Many other sectors (Automobiles, Consumer Electronics, Chemicals), have radically improved in quality since the 70s.
thechao 2y ago
My dad was privy to my grandfather complaining to my great-great grandfather about the bad quality of houses, tractors, and clothes in the 1950s — that the stuff built in the 1910s and 1920s was so much better. Carl (in his thick southern German accent) made the point that all the cheap clothes they bought to keep them out of jail (public nudity) disintegrated in a year and the only clothes that survived were the expensive ones, or the random ones that somehow survived the test of time. Apparently he'd had the same argument with his grandfather back in the 1890s. Sooo... I dunno; maybe things have always gotten worse, and were always better in the past? That doesn't seem to jive with the way I live vs the literal log fucking cabin they lived in.
- jollyllama 2y ago
  > that the stuff built in the 1910s and 1920s was so much better. Pre-war goods.
- spenczar5 2y ago
  > That doesn't seem to jive with the way I live vs the literal log fucking cabin they lived in. I propose that different goods have different trajectories. Lighting is better and cheaper than 100 years ago. Boots maybe aren't.
  - amoshebb 2y ago
    Maybe, but boots for sure are better and cheaper than 100 years ago. I think the only thing that makes this slightly confusing is that what were old mass-produced workwear have become limited-run fashion items, so looking at things like M1918 boots or cowboy boots and comparing to modern Red Wings or Luccheses it's tempting to say "Oh how much more expensive leather-soled brass-hardware hand-tanned full-grain leather boots are now", ignoring that Modern soldiers wear lightweight goretex running shoe-boots and farmers wear cozy neoprene pull-ons with anti-slip soles and carbon fibre toes, both of which cost half of inflation-adjusted prices of the objectively inferior boots of 1925.
    - viciousvoxel 2y ago
Tempat 2y ago
Your point about inflation is such a clear observation that it seems self-evident, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen decline in product quality linked explicitly to causing skewed inflation numbers (and even skewed productivity numbers) before. Would be fun to see a same-quality inflation index, as tricky as that would be.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
[dead]
owenversteeg 2y ago
I'm not sure why, but the inflation estimate felt off and inflation calculators get less accurate the further back you go, so I looked up some figures for the 1930s. Turns out that $18 is a decent estimate. You can absolutely make a thick, hard-wearing shirt for $18 - I am sure someone does indeed make this shirt; most people just want different things. Today's consumer wants clothes that fit nicely, something in fashion, with soft materials and trendy colors and comforting advertising. I can't point you to a $18 hard-wearing work shirt, but I can point you to something even better: regular Wrangler Rustler jeans from Walmart, $13.98. 100% cotton, thick solid denim, and they look and fit the same as $100 Levis. Even better, for the denim nerds there is a raw denim version, only available online in a boot cut; select the color "rigid" [3]. In another category of heavyweight cloth objects, I can also recommend the "Rothco" canvas duffle bag, $30 [4]. Brand in quotation marks because it seems to be generic Indian military surplus sold under other names as well. The stitching is a bit on the weak side for extreme use but it generally holds up well. If anyone here knows of an even sturdier alternative I would love to hear it. My checklist: 1) material - must be all natural fiber, 2) weight of material, 3) strength of stitching, 4) type of stitch, 5) reviews that mention serious long-term use. One review by a mechanic/firefighter/etc is worth ten million generic reviews. Anyone else have tips on quality, long-lasting clothes? ------------------- I used this very useful site [0] to find a paper discussing household income in 1930 [1] which estimates the mean at around $2900/yr and the median around $2500/yr per "family." 2023 household income is 114.5k/year mean and 80.6k/year median. That is, household income has increased by a factor of 32.2x. That said, household size has declined from 4.1 to 2.5 from 1930 to 2025, so that is 0.61x the size in 1930, so median individual income is really up by 19.6x. So your $0.79 shirt is today $15 (by median individual income) or $24 (by mean individual income.) [0] https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1930-1939 https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1930-1939 [1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89043221407&seq=31&q1=median https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89043221407&seq=31... [2] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-282.pdf https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-2... ------------------- [3] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wrangler-Rustler-Men-s-and-Big-Men-s-Regular-Fit-Boot-Cut-Cotton-Jeans/5982549 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wrangler-Rustler-Men-s-and-Big-Me... [4] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XNW1UI https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XNW1UI
Mountain_Skies 2y ago
There's been a lot of discussion in recent years about how fashion has stabilized over the past couple of decades whereas it used to be that fashion was in constant flux. Can we notice much difference between the typical street clothes of today versus those of a decade or even two decades ago? The clothing styles of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s are all quite different. Perhaps the lower quality means the industry now has a way to guarantee constant product sales so they're no longer pushing fashion trends as hard as they used to. Trends certainly do still come and go, especially for young women, but overall society seems to have settled into a state of low energy for fashion change.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Might have something to do with "trend forecasting" companies coming into vogue and quickly becoming standard for clothing companies (among others) starting in the '80s, leading to more-conservative offerings. The Articles of Interest podcast had an episode about it, weird and (of late) influential world I had no idea about.
cvarjas 2y ago
Le Laboureur work shirts can be under $150 at some stores. They are a different style though and have been difficult to find in stock online. I only recently ordered some so have no direct experience. The durability of the fabric and quality of construction are substantial from everything I've read.
whateveracct 2y ago
You don't even have to go back that far. I have shirts from Target I bought in the late 2000s/early 2010s that are still in great condition despite regular use. They've outlived plenty of newer clothes. The entire space got enshittified in the last decade especially.
maxglute 2y ago
A $4 pair of costco wool socks performs as well as $40 darn toughs. There's a youtube channel that visits Asian clothing manufacturing expos to get quotes. TLDR the difference between a disposable $10 shirt and durable $100 shirt is like $5 in material and labor. $20-$50 for a $100 jacket and $500 one. It is extremely cheap to make very high quality clothing now, brands just decided to segregate market and capture value according to durability, percieved or actual, and take disgusting margins off the top. I wonder how much companies spend on branding/advertisement 50 years ago.

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.

hgomersall 2y ago
The problem now is that paying a high price doesn't imply quality.

kasey_junk 2y ago

How do you know they were better made back then? This is a place where you have to be extremely aware of survivor bias. You also have to be very careful about inflation adjusted dollars vs actual wealth values. For instance the median income in the US in 1933 was between $500 and $1000. Inflation adjusted that’s between 15 and 30k but our median income now is much higher than that. Anecdotally my grandmother felt she was wealthy compared to her peers in the 1930s because her family could buy a dress per person per year from the Sears catalog.

alabastervlog 2y ago
We have both real examples of specific common models, and depictions (photos, sales art) of same, and not just ones regarded as “high end” (which, we’re talking outdoor workwear in an age when that wasn’t remotely fashionable like it would be after the 1950s, so there weren’t really fancy versions of these) and the fabric is better, and the construction more involved and durable, than that in an $50+ chambray shirt today. For a (supposedly) inflation-adjusted $18. Most of the examples I’ve found that approach the originals in quality are $200 or more. I want to know if anyone tracks one down for less than $150, because I’d likely own 2-3 of them before the year’s out if they do. 8x the supposedly inflation-adjusted price of the original would be, from what I can tell, a bargain. Your note that a dress per year felt like a lot is exactly my point: if I had to pay $150 per blue-collar work shirt I’d feel like I was doing pretty great if I could responsibly buy a couple per year. IOW, buying similar quality goods, our alleged improvements in QOL are significantly diminished. [edit] if you look into what decently-constructed (not even finely-made! Just, like, not shit) dresses made with fabrics that aren’t mostly or entirely plastic cost, they’re hundreds of dollars today, even for fairly simple ones, especially midi-length or longer (as there’s more fabric than in a mini)
- cratermoon 2y ago
  > a dress per year Also keep in mind that the quality and durability of that dress, and similarly-priced clothing of the era, made it possible to not need to buy new every season. That dress could be expected to last for years, longer with simple repairs. Also, shoes are even worse than clothing for declining price/decreasing quality.

gosub100 2y ago

Has cotton become more expensive in the last 90 years? What about labor? I'm sorry for being lazy, I don't have time right now to research. I just want to bring up the point that a lot can change in almost a century. So just doing an inflation-adjusted price comparison is not that helpful.

alabastervlog 2y ago
Oh, I don’t think it’s so much that: I think, rather, that improvements in economic productivity have been wildly overstated, especially since the 1970s, and instead we’ve been seeing a lot of our “improvements” in the form of goods getting worse. IOW inflation in terms of same-quality goods from the early or mid 20th century is a ton higher than our ordinary inflation rate, and much (not all!) of our “productivity improvements” are actually goods getting worse—inflation’s only as low as it is because we’re treating worse goods as comparable to better ones.
- thehappypm 2y ago
  I think this thread is conflating "quality going down" and "low-cost tier getting cheaper and more popular." Look at Ikea. They sell a wooden table with four chairs for $199 (Hagernas). $199 for a place for a family of four to eat on new furniture, and it looks all right! That is a remarkable amount of value. Even if that won't last forever, high-quality stuff has always been expensive; like any dining set that anyone would consider "quality" would be at least $1000 new, or the cost of five of these Ikea sets. So I guess my point is that the Dust Bowl farmers who had nice furniture maybe only had that because they didn't have a choice; maybe they would have preferred to save that money or buy clothes or better food but they really had no low-end options. And having that choice for an Ikea table would have actually made them richer, not poorer.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    Another factor is reluctance to repair. When a plastic laminated particle board breaks, virtually nobody wants to fix it. I don't personally know how, but it's not impossible. For whatever reason, simple repair skills have massively deteriorated in later generations.

mtreis86 2y ago

> If you find one under $150, please let me know. Gustin has a couple shirts that fit the profile, for instance this triple-stitched 11oz workshirt for $114 https://www.weargustin.com/store/shirts-168-italy-dark-oak-workshirt https://www.weargustin.com/store/shirts-168-italy-dark-oak-w...

alabastervlog 2y ago
Hahaha, I admit I posted in part to get the “HN is better than Google at finding things, as long as you claim it can’t be done” effect :-) Not quite the fabric I had in mind, but those look damn good, really close style-wise, and are on the short-list for the next time I sit down to look over my next batch of clothing purchases. Thanks!
WillAdams 2y ago
Crowd-funded, not available for direct order/purchase.
- jwagenet 2y ago
  I doubt the sears catalog shirt was made by the thousands sitting on warehouse shelves.
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    The Five Brothers Shirt which I was gifted when I was down on my luck and just out of the service was made in a quantity which allowed a friend's aunt to purchase 4 of them as gifts for all the younger folks at her Christmas party that year, and there were quite a few on the sales floor at Sears when my folks took me school clothes shopping each year. They are still in business, but I wonder what changed when the last time I looked at their shirts, they were north of $150, and now they are quite competitive in price, and I worry about the quality as is being debated in this thread. Still have that shirt, four decades later, and still wear it around the house, though it's a bit frayed from rough work chopping and hauling firewood when I was younger.

adregan 2y ago

Would a Filson[0] fit the bill ($145)? It’s 5oz. material (what weight are you targeting?). Anecdotally, I wear a wool coat from Filson that is nearly 20 years old. Halfway through its life they reconstructed the fraying cuffs for free. 0: https://www.filson.com/products/chambray-cpo-shirt-rinsed-indigo-chambray https://www.filson.com/products/chambray-cpo-shirt-rinsed-in...

devin 2y ago
Filson’s quality has continued to decline over the years.
- devin 2y ago
  Just to be clear: Filson is still "good" quality for the price IMO, but vintage Filson is built like a tank. My button down shirts from 15 years ago have never even needed a button replaced, whereas newer shirt construction from Bangladesh does not seem as strong to me. Material quality is better/heavier for my older shirts. I'm not sure if they scrapped it, but somewhat recently (a year ago?) I saw that they were trying to facilitate sales of vintage Filson through their site presumably because they see the people who care about quality buying vintage Filson on eBay instead of the newer stuff they're selling. Also, while it's certainly not the case that "made overseas = lesser quality", Filson's website has a prominently displayed filter/category for "Made in the USA". This is where you can get a really heavy knit sweater for $500 that IMO is worthy of the old Filson name.
- autoexec 2y ago
  This is the same story with everything. Companies all want to take as much as they can possibly squeeze out of you while giving you as little as they can get away with. A few companies start out by charging higher prices for higher quality, often pricing out a large number of consumers, but eventually the greed wins out and they start to cut corners too. If you're wealthy enough to keep chasing after luxury goods you'll be ripped off at a slower pace than most, but eventually you'll be increasingly disappointed in what you're getting and have to look harder and harder, and pay higher and higher prices for anything nice. The poorest people are stuck paying increasing prices for poisonous products that are basically trash and that's all they can barely afford.

blululu 2y ago

This is a good question and this is definitely happening but it's not clear how big a percentage of purchased goods fall into this category. Many other sectors (Automobiles, Consumer Electronics, Chemicals), have radically improved in quality since the 70s.

thechao 2y ago

My dad was privy to my grandfather complaining to my great-great grandfather about the bad quality of houses, tractors, and clothes in the 1950s — that the stuff built in the 1910s and 1920s was so much better. Carl (in his thick southern German accent) made the point that all the cheap clothes they bought to keep them out of jail (public nudity) disintegrated in a year and the only clothes that survived were the expensive ones, or the random ones that somehow survived the test of time. Apparently he'd had the same argument with his grandfather back in the 1890s. Sooo... I dunno; maybe things have always gotten worse, and were always better in the past? That doesn't seem to jive with the way I live vs the literal log fucking cabin they lived in.

jollyllama 2y ago
> that the stuff built in the 1910s and 1920s was so much better. Pre-war goods.
spenczar5 2y ago
> That doesn't seem to jive with the way I live vs the literal log fucking cabin they lived in. I propose that different goods have different trajectories. Lighting is better and cheaper than 100 years ago. Boots maybe aren't.
- amoshebb 2y ago
  Maybe, but boots for sure are better and cheaper than 100 years ago. I think the only thing that makes this slightly confusing is that what were old mass-produced workwear have become limited-run fashion items, so looking at things like M1918 boots or cowboy boots and comparing to modern Red Wings or Luccheses it's tempting to say "Oh how much more expensive leather-soled brass-hardware hand-tanned full-grain leather boots are now", ignoring that Modern soldiers wear lightweight goretex running shoe-boots and farmers wear cozy neoprene pull-ons with anti-slip soles and carbon fibre toes, both of which cost half of inflation-adjusted prices of the objectively inferior boots of 1925.
  - viciousvoxel 2y ago

Tempat 2y ago

Your point about inflation is such a clear observation that it seems self-evident, and yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen decline in product quality linked explicitly to causing skewed inflation numbers (and even skewed productivity numbers) before. Would be fun to see a same-quality inflation index, as tricky as that would be.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

[dead]

owenversteeg 2y ago

I'm not sure why, but the inflation estimate felt off and inflation calculators get less accurate the further back you go, so I looked up some figures for the 1930s. Turns out that $18 is a decent estimate. You can absolutely make a thick, hard-wearing shirt for $18 - I am sure someone does indeed make this shirt; most people just want different things. Today's consumer wants clothes that fit nicely, something in fashion, with soft materials and trendy colors and comforting advertising. I can't point you to a $18 hard-wearing work shirt, but I can point you to something even better: regular Wrangler Rustler jeans from Walmart, $13.98. 100% cotton, thick solid denim, and they look and fit the same as $100 Levis. Even better, for the denim nerds there is a raw denim version, only available online in a boot cut; select the color "rigid" [3]. In another category of heavyweight cloth objects, I can also recommend the "Rothco" canvas duffle bag, $30 [4]. Brand in quotation marks because it seems to be generic Indian military surplus sold under other names as well. The stitching is a bit on the weak side for extreme use but it generally holds up well. If anyone here knows of an even sturdier alternative I would love to hear it. My checklist: 1) material - must be all natural fiber, 2) weight of material, 3) strength of stitching, 4) type of stitch, 5) reviews that mention serious long-term use. One review by a mechanic/firefighter/etc is worth ten million generic reviews. Anyone else have tips on quality, long-lasting clothes? ------------------- I used this very useful site [0] to find a paper discussing household income in 1930 [1] which estimates the mean at around $2900/yr and the median around $2500/yr per "family." 2023 household income is 114.5k/year mean and 80.6k/year median. That is, household income has increased by a factor of 32.2x. That said, household size has declined from 4.1 to 2.5 from 1930 to 2025, so that is 0.61x the size in 1930, so median individual income is really up by 19.6x. So your $0.79 shirt is today $15 (by median individual income) or $24 (by mean individual income.) [0] https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1930-1939 https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1930-1939 [1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89043221407&seq=31&q1=median https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89043221407&seq=31... [2] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-282.pdf https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-2... ------------------- [3] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wrangler-Rustler-Men-s-and-Big-Men-s-Regular-Fit-Boot-Cut-Cotton-Jeans/5982549 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wrangler-Rustler-Men-s-and-Big-Me... [4] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XNW1UI https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XNW1UI

Mountain_Skies 2y ago

There's been a lot of discussion in recent years about how fashion has stabilized over the past couple of decades whereas it used to be that fashion was in constant flux. Can we notice much difference between the typical street clothes of today versus those of a decade or even two decades ago? The clothing styles of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s are all quite different. Perhaps the lower quality means the industry now has a way to guarantee constant product sales so they're no longer pushing fashion trends as hard as they used to. Trends certainly do still come and go, especially for young women, but overall society seems to have settled into a state of low energy for fashion change.

alabastervlog 2y ago
Might have something to do with "trend forecasting" companies coming into vogue and quickly becoming standard for clothing companies (among others) starting in the '80s, leading to more-conservative offerings. The Articles of Interest podcast had an episode about it, weird and (of late) influential world I had no idea about.

cvarjas 2y ago

Le Laboureur work shirts can be under $150 at some stores. They are a different style though and have been difficult to find in stock online. I only recently ordered some so have no direct experience. The durability of the fabric and quality of construction are substantial from everything I've read.

whateveracct 2y ago

You don't even have to go back that far. I have shirts from Target I bought in the late 2000s/early 2010s that are still in great condition despite regular use. They've outlived plenty of newer clothes. The entire space got enshittified in the last decade especially.

maxglute 2y ago

A $4 pair of costco wool socks performs as well as $40 darn toughs. There's a youtube channel that visits Asian clothing manufacturing expos to get quotes. TLDR the difference between a disposable $10 shirt and durable $100 shirt is like $5 in material and labor. $20-$50 for a $100 jacket and $500 one. It is extremely cheap to make very high quality clothing now, brands just decided to segregate market and capture value according to durability, percieved or actual, and take disgusting margins off the top. I wonder how much companies spend on branding/advertisement 50 years ago.