Fangirling and Writer-Nerd Chaos

they should make clothes that are designed by people who are familiar with human anatomy & physiology

Yeah it's not that at all. Tailors exist. They share in your disdain.

It's all about the money. Patterns will be cut from cloth with the least amount of scrap left, with no regard for the orientation of warp and weft. On top of that, fabrics aren't preshrunk before they are assembled into garments so now you're going to get shrinking that IS affected by orientation of warp and weft so you're gonna buy a 3 pack of white tshirts and after one wash all three of them will fit and twist differently

Capitalism sucks so bad

so many articles about Fast Fashion, not enough articles about what the hell is happening to the quality of clothes

Like okay. People own more pieces of clothing nowadays and they wear them a lesser number of times before throwing them out. BUT.

Why do we pretend like this is pure vanity or careless wastefulness, rather than forced by the qualities of the clothes themselves?

The other day, I was going through boxes of old clothes in the basement in search of fabric to practice sewing on. The difference in quality of the fabrics themselves is shocking! The worn-out old jeans from twenty years ago are MUCH thicker and tougher than anything more recent. My old baby clothes are made as sturdy as my work clothes from today.

In the past couple years, I have had entire seams rip out of clothes on the first wash. That's not normal!

Polyester blend shirts that feel cozy and soft when they are new, become scratchy and rough after 20 washes or so. I am trying to avoid polyester, but it gets harder and harder; the other day i couldn't find a single pack of crew socks that was 100% cotton. SOCKS!

Also, pilling is out of control. The newest pants I bought developed pills within a single day of walking around campus with a backpack.

These companies are trying to frog-boil us but touching clothes from twenty years ago, the useless crap of today would stick out like a sore thumb...

I used to caddy. I got around 35,000 steps (around 19 miles) on an average day of work. I bought 6 pairs of socks once a year, and they never formed holes in the bottom until I had already bought new socks. I still buy that brand of socks, but now I work a desk job. The socks I bought in February are already wearing thin.

I still have shirts I bought in middle school that I have worn fairly regularly that are hole-free, or only have holes where there is more wear (e.g. armpits). The wear on them matches pretty closely with the wear on shirts I got in the last couple years. One shirt I got new just a year or so ago is practically dissolving - big ass holes all over, including several in the middle of the chest.

These are not the only examples I have. I see no explanation for these facts other than a recent decrease in quality across the board. It's frankly ridiculous, and I want to do something about it, but I don't know what I can do. On an individual level, sure you can buy used, but even good quality clothing does eventually wear out, so not everyone can buy used. It seems like the only solution is producing good quality clothing, but how does an individual even work towards that?

I know there has to be real documentation of this buried somewhere in the abyssal detritus of the modern world....The companies made the choice at some point, to start using shorter staple length fibers, lesser quality fibers, less sturdy weaving, worse stitching...and the worse stitching is often pointed out by people who sew because it is visible, but i've never seen an analysis of it spanning the whole chain of clothing coming to be.

Personally, I've been experimenting with natural fibers that are alternatives to the usual ones. Dogbane (Apocyonum cannabinum) is the flax equivalent native to North America, and extremely promising, but it's far from the only one.

Peer-reviewed tags by @elprupneerg

I can confirm, it is getting harder and harder to find quality fabric for an affordable price. I can't even shop at Joann anymore, and they are the only option for a fabric store in most places that has any kind of variety in their apparel section and isn't owned by religious fundamentalists *cough* like hobby lobby *cough.* The quality of their fabrics has declined rapidly, even from before the pandemic! The only thing they have anymore is cheap synthetic fabrics, mostly polyester, and cotton which used to be decent and is getting worse by the year. AND they charge more for EVERYTHING now. AND they treat their workers like shit. (Like say what you will about hobby lobby and their fundie ideology but at least their pay scale starts at like $18 as opposed to Joann which was still paying $10.50 in 2022 and would never schedule me for more than 15 hours a week)

I know of a few boutique fabric shops but they either just have quilting cotton of varying quality or have prices that are plain unsustainable. Even the online shops I frequent are growing more questionable, and some mislabel their products so it's hard to tell what the fabric is made of or how much it weighs. The sites that are still mostly reliable for quality require you to shell out the cash.

There was one site, fabrics.com, I believe, that had a pretty good search feature and pretty affordable deadstock fabric, but it got bought by Amazon and eventually they shut down the website and subsumed it into Amazon marketplace, where it's impossible to search for anything and get reliable results.

It really is a textile wasteland out here.

It's incredible how people have been protesting pants and skirts not having pockets but not a single peep is heard over the fact that skirts no longer have underskirts by default. Underskirts (or lining) was a thing when I was a child, no skirt would be made without lining, you didn't have to think and check if your whole ass is visible in a skirt because lining was a thing!!!! Now most skirts don't and it's simply because it's cheaper, fuck the fact that a customer doesn't want their panties shown in broad daylight, it saves a couple of cents on material.

okay so this has definitely breached containment and I want to point something out:

"crochet can't be made by machines" went from being a cool fun fact to being a call to action of "so if you see mass manufactured crochet in Target, that was made by a person and they were underpaid and you should boycott it" which is true, it was made by a person, but EVERY item of clothing you own (that you did not purchase from a company using ethical labor) was made by a person being underpaid (at *best*.)

Sewing machines are operated by *people*. Knitting machines are operated by *people*. Yes lots of the process is automated but you cannot tell a machine "make me a t-shirt" or "make me a knit cardigan".

Higher awareness of fast fashion, and the true human labor and abuse behind it, is GREAT, but let's not pretend that the crochet hat in target is THE problem. Every article of clothing in target is the problem. "All clothes are made by people" is the jumping off point here into understanding this issue it's not just crochet it's the whole thing ahhhhHHHHHHHHHH

You thought I was done ranting about fast fashion and how the way it undervalues everything fucks up the artisans who spend years honing their craft you were WRONG

One thing that really grinds my gears is people undervaluing beadwork. Like. Sure! Maybe it’s because my moms side is Métis, maybe it’s because my sister is Cree. Maybe I’m being over sensitive about it but each time I hear someone look at beaded earrings or a beaded necklace or anything and go ‘bet I could make that’ I want to hand them the needle and the tiny glass beads used and tell them to make it themselves

Because there’s work that goes into this! There’s work and skill and years of honing your craft to be able to make those beaded works you see! It takes hours and hours to make those things and having all that skill and work be dismissed pisses me off

Let sewing radicalize you against fast fashion

"you pay more for boujee products because they are made with love and care by small workshops uwu"

steal everything that isn't nailed down come back later with a crowbar

FUN FACT

Many designer brand names make their big designer labels and their affordable lines BOTH in fast fashion sweatshops with similar quality of labor, pay, and other detrimental factors. One of the major differences, of course?

The price they charge you, the consumer, for the finished product.

Paying more for a name brand doesn't free you from fast fashion, because fast fashion is not a consumer issue. It is an industry level failure.

The other thing so-called ‘prestige brands’ will do is bring in workers from countries where labor is cheap (like China) to places like France and Italy, pay them garbage wages, treat them like shit, and slap a ‘made in Italy’ label on the product to sell it for thousands.

Article on the topic from 2018. Similar to the exploitation of U.S. immigrant ag workers, basically.

It's like how "Made in U.S." can mean made with prison slave labor. Or how a chocolate company can advertise their chocolate as sustainably sourced, except this is a self-determined label and may or may not exclude the use of child slave labor. Or how you can boycott a company but still end up giving them money because it turns out they also own dozens of other brands.

These problems really need a government regulation solution, not a consumer solution.

still thinking about the brainrot that fast fashion has caused in people, like i made this pair of pants that are black and white with a cool flowery design, and an acquaintance saw them and said "wow i'd pay like 20 dollars for you to make me a pair" and i could barely think with how utterly horrified i was at that; i told them that 20 dollars wouldn't even cover the materials, let alone the hours of work that went into cutting, sewing, ironing, hemming, altering, etc. they just had this look on their face when i told them that, when i said i wouldn't make them a pair for even 100 dollars because that was still way too low of an amount, a look that said "you're crazy for thinking that those cost 100 dollars" and maybe i am crazy but holy shit, 20 dollars for a pair of handmade, durable, lined pants fitted specifically to your measurements? 20 dollars for upwards of 60 hours of work? 20 dollars for several yards of high-quality fabric, thread, and buttons? 20 dollars???

THE FINISHED INNER SEAMS WTF??????? Y'ALL WERE GETTING FINISHED EDGES????

Crochet is all over fashion again this spring. Reminder that crochet cannot be done by machine, so someone had to make it by hand. There is literally no fast fashion brand that is paying a fair wage to the artisans who are doing that work, even taking local wages in other countries into account. And you can tell that by the pricing. I crochet faster than most people I know, and a jacket always takes me at least 20 hours. And dresses take 30-50. The smaller the yarn, the more hours it’ll take to make something.

There are tons of crocheters on Etsy setting their own prices. Check there before you shop Target or Express or any other place selling on a rack.