Women’s/girls’ clothing also seems of worse quality on average than men’s/boys’. I suppose this is just another form of the pink tax, but I’ve learned a few ways to make items last a little longer over the years. I’ll share them in the hope it brings you, the comrade reading this, the information you need to keep your favorite garment in rotation longer.
Learn to sew buttons back on and keep the tools on hand to do so. Wrap the thread around the underside of the button a few times once you’ve sewn it on before tying off to add some extra strength to the threads holding it on.
Washing machines are rough on clothes. Buy large lingerie bags to put anything delicate in. If your washer likes to eat the drawstrings of your sweatpants? Bag 'em. If your long johns keep getting tangled up with other garments and stretching out? Bag 'em. They’re also really nice at keeping my socks from getting lost in the wash.
And this one isn’t so much a durability tip, so much as it is a buying one, but if you aren’t looking at what fibers the garment is made of, you should be. Natural fibers breathe better and feel better on the skin than synthetics. I think there are some hi-tech synthetics that are better now but cotton beats the shit out of polyester and acrylic in every metric I care about.
Damn it’s kinda looking like the rate of profit has a tendency to decrease
Isnt this literally just survivorship bias?
Your average k-mart shirt in the 90s was much better quality than today. We can make clothes cheaper now because of technology advances. We can work with thinner fabric at higher volumes with the same amount of labor. Labor was actually cheaper in the 90s so it has been quite a change.
Partially, although the decreasing quality of products is a real phenomenon under capitalism. A factory owner could make sturdy goods with high quality material… but they can save costs with less material, or a lower quality substance. Plus, there’s more return customers the shorter the lifespan of the good. When goods become worse because of cost cutting or because the manufacture can’t keep up with cheaper-yet-worse competitors, that’s called market obsolescence. When capitalists deliberately shorten a good’s lifespan to increase returning sales, it’s called planned obsolescence.
if you have family with costco membership, you can sometimes get some very decent clothing there
