It's the same with kids clothes. I think the labour and overheads are dominant - the cost of fabric is probably only a small fraction of the cost of clothes.
You're not wrong. The cost of cheap mass-produced clothing, relative to consumer income in most industrialized countries, puts such clothes in the range of being effectively disposable to the middle class. A t-shirt can be had for under $10, less than the cost of a decent meal in a restaurant. A cheap pair of shoes for $30. Such abundance would have been unthinkable even a century ago. Of course there are ecological implications to our disposable attitude to clothing.
Doing this would require on-demand manufacturing with operational costs close to what currently exists. I can see how it could end up cheaper simply due to not making clothes that don't get sold. I'm sure there's a lot of waste currently.
Costs of production, for things likes clothes especially, are very cheap; the value is in marketing and branding. With fashion, what you buy is effectively a tag that lets you cash in on some of the cachet of the brand's advertising spend and the image it portrays.
The actual goods are very secondary, and are increasingly poor quality. Designer shirts I buy these days rip in the elbows and fray at the collar in less than 40 wears or so; jeans wear through at the knee at around the 100 day mark.
I would be surprised if materials and labour for production exceeded £10 on a typical £100 shirt or jeans.
I guess I had a different reaction, which is interesting to me in itself.
The closeups of the fabric look like the coat would still be expensive today. Clothing is efficiently produced, but much of it is modest quality, and produced from commodity fibers like cotton or polyester.
If you want something that's a more exotic weave, made from a different fiber (say, a silk-wool blend) it's a different story.
The impression I got from this was of more craftsmanship in the fabric production, but also more reuse of that fabric.
There's something to be said for factory-efficient bulk clothing production, but I've come to appreciate the other philosophy as well. Many of my secondhand clothes have lasted much longer than firsthand purchases, at the same price, because the initially expensive garment was better made with more durable fabric. I can actually think of a t-shirt I recently purchased that's a bit like the coat in the article, in that it's made from an unusual fabric that I had tailored because I didn't like the hem style.
Of course, there's probably some survivorship bias involved too: my guess is the cheaper bulk clothing from the era of that coat is all gone, disposed of just like we might a cheap cotton t shirt today.
Much of this isn’t conspicuous consumption it’s a lack of reuse inside of developed nations. Low quality clothing is so cheap it’s hard to fathom, making buying new simply easier and just as affordable.
“In 2019, American families spent on average about 2% of their income on clothing.” It’s vastly more affordable than “In the 1950s, the average American family spent about 10% of its income on clothing, and that money bought them just a few sturdy garments a year.”
Your argument is on point but it lacks the two that will drive the century to come:
- clothes are cheap because they are mined/manufactured/transported mostly with energy coming from fossil sources, and the IAE itself says that Oil has reached its peak. If energy goes down, production can only go down (yes, processes have been more efficient, but the efficiency has only transformed into even more stuff produced. That's the Jevons effect)
- clothes are cheap because their pollution, chief among them CO2 emission, is "free". But it's the kind of cost we'd rather not be paying
I'm curious about the DARPA work you mention. Do you have any references?
And yes: Ms. Banner's explanation of the costs of production -- in materials, governed by the layers and needs of the garment -- and in labour, was highly illuminating. It's instructive both in how much the underlying production costs of fine clothing are, the markups which still remain in high fashion, and how inexpensive most day-to-day clothing is.
The reason people buy clothes is because clothes are significantly cheaper than they used to be. By the time you've purchased fabric, a pattern, and put in the labor the cost to make clothes far exceeds the cost to buy clothes.
The article mostly doesn't talk about this; according to this, the price of new clothing has dropped so substantially that even reprocessing secondhand clothes into new textiles is largely a dying business. With all the environmental issues that entails.
> People owned fewer pieces of clothing overall, but everyone could still afford to be clothed.
Note that owning fewer pieces of clothing overall doesn't significantly affect your yearly cost of clothing, it just affects your initial cost to fill out your wardrobe.
What drives up yearly costs is that most new low-cost clothing doesn't last for many wears - it either wears out quickly due to being of relatively low quality, or is eventually donated/thrown out after languishing in a closet for years.
That kind of cloth manufacturing isn't really scalable. So clothes would be a lot more expensive, even by western standards, and even considering how labor would be much cheaper in those countries.
reply