Your point was that, now, "it is socially unacceptable to wear the same thing for days in a row, even if you change your undergarments", ergo, society has upgraded (its expectations of acceptable wear), i.e., moved the "goal posts". That means, we solved the old problem of not putting people in rags, and have a new problem, of constantly new outfits. Absolute gain: clothing problem "solved", replaced with new "wardrobe problem". This is what progress looks like. We always find new, harder, problems. The fact that there is a problem distracts people from admitting we have solved some.
You're moving the goal posts in your rebuttal by adding environmental concerns.
Absolute poverty has been dropping dramatically as a fraction of the growing world population. Look at the trends, not the snapshot. Show some fricking gratitude for the world of plenty in which humanity exists.
I think this is very good news. Fast fashion leads to resource and people exploitation. This is great that people use their old clothes and refrain from buying new ones for no other reason than the old ones have become unwearable.
(edit: typo)
We definitely don't need to change wardrobes entirely 2x per year, at great cost in externalities such as pollution from all the shipping. I'm sure you understood that this is the point.
There is a massive reuse culture out there. It's just not been industrialized by a handful of companies or chased after by VCs. For clothes there are garage sales, second hand shops, and donations to those who are less fortunate (e.g., to the growing size of the group at or below the poverty line).
Part of the problem is the number of clothes that don't last long. They are expensive and wear out quickly.
Another part of it is culture. How many people can pull off wearing clothes from 10 or 20 years ago without being judged for doing so.
This is a larger problem than sharing and availability. It's cultural.
You don't need any company to sell you yet another wardrobe full of clothes because the point is to consume less clothes, not more. take care of and appreciate your existing wardrobe. Switching style type of behavior is at the root of this expanded carbon footprint. Remember 85% of production ends up in the dump in a year. Unfathomable. Honestly the level of consumption right now is impossible given anything resembling normal consumption. It has little to do with cheap fashion or uniforms and everything with some people wanting to shop every weekend. Who has time for that anyways? If you still want to dress like Jobs then buy your black turtleneck wool sweater, but not five of them in one go. Don't throw anything away for it, either. After a while your bulging wardrobe will make you space conscious enough to very carefully consider any subsequent purchase.
You're only 1-4 generations removed from ancestors who only owned one set of clothing, not necessarily including shoes.
Something that's stuck in my mind is how prosperity in India, not that many decades ago, meant that women could wash one Sari in the river without being naked, since they now owned two.
When I see people complaining about too much "disposable" clothing, I am not impressed.
Anyway, there is an environmental price as well as a $$$ price to clothing production. What you pay might not be the true price (eg. aquifers getting drained, soil erosion, CO2 emission etc, possible deforestation).
Even ignoring my point about non-fiscal cost "that can be bought new for a day's or even a week's wages" is great if you're rich, even relatively speaking. From wiki: "...which found roughly 734 million people [in the world] remained in absolute poverty [circa 2015]". I guess you grew up not having your parents unable to buy except as a last resort and having to patch everything repeatedly.
That's conspicuous consumption gone mad, it seems to me too many people have far too much disposable income.
What is it about people that they cannot be content with their clothes in that they have to change them long before they're worn out? This is fashion gone mad.
I never throw out clothes, and I can keep the same items for many years - I've still got jeans, BD dungarees, etc. that I bought over 20 years ago. When they eventually become threadbare I tear them up for cleaning rags.
What the hell is wrong with these people that they can be so wasteful?
If there was no other source of clothing, you'd be willing to spend crab money.
In fact, this was the case during the industrial revolution. A pair of pants would cost a full week's wages. This is why people back then owned like 2 to 4 outfits.
It's amazing how many people just can't comprehend how the world can realign so different things become 'normal'. Like, "nobody would ever pay that for clothes". What, you think they'd go naked if there was no alternative?
We’re buying 60 per cent more clothes now than we did 15 years ago.
This is something I find baffling. I have a clothes closet and a chest of drawers. They comfortably hold more than enough for me to go a week or two without doing laundry. When I've worn too many holes in something for me to patch and use as outdoor work wear it goes in the garbage.
That people have such an addiction to buying new clothes they have to throw away or donate intact clothes is utterly perverse.
I know people who have just about one garment per day of the week and they rotate them. That is it. Not because they are poor --they just don't like change and like the same thing.
And, indeed, before the '50's, many Americans had a couple of changes of clothing for the week plus their Sunday clothes. So even we're not that far removed from that time.
I'm not entirely sure the best solution is to educate people on buying quality clothes. While that is important, I suspect that consumption isn't just due to shitty clothes wearing out too soon. It's probably due to our culture of fashion trends and constant consumption and the "keeping up with the Joneses". If you go on fashion subreddits, you'll hear people talk about how you need to buy long lasting clothes, inevitably quoting that tired Terry Pratchett segment on boots^[1]. Except these same people have 10 pairs of long lasting boots!
I don't know the answer because honestly, I do like buying new clothes. I do like changing how I look. I do like looking good. And I'm far from alone in this regard. Maybe instead of blaming the consumer, there should be some regulation on manufacturing clothing? Or some sort of carbon/pollution tax? A cynical take on this is that fast fashion companies are attempting to foist the blame onto the consumer, when really they're preying off a universal desire to look pretty and polluting the environment in the process. We should of course educate people on the impact of their choices. But telling people to stop buying stuff to make them look pretty is going against a very basic, very fundamental desire.
Increasingly, I'm seeing it as yet another form of market manipulation to try to squeeze ever so much more money out of citizen's wallets.
Used to be I could identify a brand or style of clothing, find items which fit, and return reliably to the same vendor repeatedly. This was my habit in my teens, it remains my preferred mode in my 40s. And while I'm rarely accused of being highly fashion conscious, I'm also not a slob (it really doesn't take much to have a sense of style).
The first time I encountered a wholesale change in fashion was when the Gap discontinued a line of jeans in the late 1980s. Being naturally gifted with large thighs, an aviator cut worked exceptionally well for me (and yes, I also miss parachute pants and Zoot Suits, thanks for asking).
After a bit of casting around, I turned up another store which carried a consistent cut of jeans and wore those through the 1990s and most of the 2000s. For casual office wear, I'd discovered a few department and men's clothing stores which carried reliable fits.
I had a line of black t-shirts with a nice cotton fabric and a subtly off-black color which became a fave. Much as Steve Jobs bought a lifetime supply of black mock-turtlenecks, I'd found my shirt for life (but failed to secure a lifetime supply of them at the time, an error in judgment).
Pretty much all of that came to a crashing end in 2010. Numerous vendors changed their sizes -- same brand and size which had previously fit (as evidenced by what was in my wardrobe) now didn't, and in ridiculous fashion. Virtually everything suddenly went "skinny", which is to say, less fabric, and fabrics became very noticeably cheaper.
I first discovered this on one of my grab-and-dash shopping visits: walk into store, pick up a few pair of jeans and shirts of proven reliable fit, pay, head home (I'm pretty much the antithesis of a recreational shopper, malls are torture palaces).
Pulling on the new duds for work the next morning I discovered I couldn't breath. Everything felt 2-3 sizes too small. I double-checked sizes, they corresponded with what I'd bought in the past, pulled existing clothes out of the closet, and returned to the store with my purchases for a full refund as they no longer produced items which fit me.
It took over a dozen stops to find jeans and shirts which fit.
And given the "fast fashion" fad, I've got absolutely no assurance that I'll be able to rely on those vendors in future.
Oh, and for those of you suggesting online shopping: SRSLY? For clothes, which you wear next to your skin, for which fit, cut, finish, and feel are absolutely crucial? Thanks, but no. Worse, with present levels of quality control (and I suspect: highly variable producer sourcing), it's not even sufficient to find a style which fits and order a count of those: you've got to individually try on and examine every last damned item.
The result is I've gone from being a reliable customer happy to return to a store repeatedly to one who treats every encounter as a hostile and frustrating experience for which I'm not likely to achieve anything remotely resembling satisfaction.
I've considered custom tailoring, though I've not gone that route yet, for shirts and slacks. Though as I mostly wear t-shirts and jeans, the additional cost is tremendous. It's actually not so bad for some tailors I've explored, though the one I'd earmarked for future items appears to have gone out of business, and of course, I'd have needed to first see what they'd produce (with ~6 weeks turnaround) rather than simply buying something off the rack and having it altered (which has worked in the past).
What I don't understand is why with all the supposed advances in personalization, there isn't an affordable and readily accessible, brick-and-mortar service by which people can specify the clothes they want, have measurements taken, and receive (with a satisfaction guarantee) clothes which actually fit. There've been some noises about this in past, and there are "made to measure" (which is not the same as bespoke) "pop-up" tailors such as Indochino -- the one time I'd found them in real life it was an absolute zoo with ~60 minute wait simply to get into the storefront for measurement.
I'm not sure this is "ripe for disruption", but it's certainly rife with disappointment.
When it comes to "fast fashion" that's all anyone can ask of you. The complaints are leveled at those who treat garments as literally disposable, worn just once or twice then tossed to make room for a new thing.
It's an entire ethos that fashion requires constant change. It's no longer seasonal, but weekly.
You'd never have to change clothes again. Wear one of these, and you can have your work uniform, change to your football team, go on failed dates, and so on. Fast fashion is not great for the planet, and you don't have to use space in your house for a bunch of clothes that are mostly not being worn.
Exactly, the fashion industry needs a hard stop and to be replaced with a environmentally responsible and ethical approach.
I've almost completely pivoted to wearing classic polo shirts (so much better than t-shirts) and workwear(-derived) pants and shorts. Work pants run the gamut from heavy-duty carpenter/bricklayer-type designs to clean straight-forward chinos and classic men's pants for service staff, waiters and the like. Designs that are clean and decidedly non-flashy, and last for a long time. I also prefer work shirts to dress shirts, I like the thicker softer fabrics, and just like how the collar on a polo shirt is genius in the sun, rolling up the sleeves on a shirt makes it more versatile.
If a specific brand's clothing isn't both comfortable and durable, they simply do not last long in the workwear segment, because word of mouth spreads like wildfire among colleagues.
As a bonus, most workwear is made to be washed at 60 or even 70 degrees C, which means I'll probably never wash it to pieces at 40 degress, unlike some of the more fashionable clothes I used to own.
You're moving the goal posts in your rebuttal by adding environmental concerns.
Absolute poverty has been dropping dramatically as a fraction of the growing world population. Look at the trends, not the snapshot. Show some fricking gratitude for the world of plenty in which humanity exists.
reply