Clothes used to be made better. I have a t-shirt that my mom got from J.C. Penney in the 90’s and it’s still in great shape and I still wear it today. I don’t know how long my clothes are going to last, but safe to say they’re likely not going to last that long. Even IKEA wasn’t chipboard in the 90’s, from what I hear.
Things aren’t built to be durable in the majority of cases, and it makes it much harder to be sustainable. I also believe the onus of safe disposal and recycling should be on the companies that choose to use it in their packaging. It’s reduce, reuse and then recycle. It was supposed to be the last choice, guys. Anyway, I guess that’s my first tangent.
The explosion of off-the-shelf ready made clothes ties back to the invention of sewing machines. Before then, people were hand-sewing and mending clothes at home. It was fabric they could afford, in a style they liked, and they could essentially make it custom fit. It pays to know how to mend and alter.
Since ready-made clothes got more common and affordable - I’m probably missing a few decades in between - people naturally started to treat clothes as more disposable. This was not the case earlier - since we’re on the internet, I’m going to specify again that I am not a historian and the title does say layman.
People treat many things as disposable nowadays, but that’s a different tangent for a different day. As people started to lose the skill of stitching and mending on a broader level, they got more dependent on shopping. The industry has obviously tried their best to prompt consumption. If you veer into overconsumption, well, it’s certainly good for them!
In this day and age, obviously most people are buying their clothes from shops. There’s been a resurgence in hand stitching and sewing but I would call it a niche interest at best at this point, though seemingly steadily increasing.
Weave and weft no longer matter, nor do they care about it in fabric construction. In simple terms (i.e. this is as much as I’ve understood), warp and weft are the threads running vertically and horizontally in fabric, which create its structure and strength. When these threads are not done/aligned well, they’re more likely to break or be uneven. That leads to the fabric having holes, weak spots, or uneven texture, making it less durable and lower quality. As you may have gathered, many fashion brands today ignore these important details to focus on trends and faster production to keep up with people trying to replace their - you guessed it - terribly made clothes. A really sad loop.
I recently saw that so-called luxury brands like LV don’t even bother to align their embossing / logos at the seams. There are tumblr blogs with quality comparison pictures, if you want to look it up. The lack of attention to detail even for this kind of claim to quality is astonishing and I was certainly surprised to find out about it. It’s part of a broader change across the industry where they simply don’t care. They have their brand name and value; their profit margins keep increasing while their quality falters.
I haven’t even truly gotten started on fast fashion and the rapidly degrading quality of products. It’s made things exponentially worse, and the amount of trash created is staggering. And somehow it’s nobody’s responsibility. It’s just trash floating through the oceans at the end of the day. Which mostly doesn’t even disintegrate back into the earth.
All this is just my recent coalescing thoughts about the state of affairs. Is there a satisfying conclusion to this essay? I suppose not. Did I learn anything from it? Maybe that it’s better to hold onto the clothes I have for a multitude of reasons. The quality is only getting worse, I don’t want to deal with fast fashion, and I like learning to mend anyway. I would rather buy individual pieces intentionally when I find legitimately good fabric quality and construction. But that’s just me. Your interpretation and takeaway could well be different. Leave a comment below if you’d like to share!
P.S. I noticed that my last blog post was in 2022, and going through the not-long archives, I found this one and I’m really happy I wrote this piece now :) thank you for visiting!
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