Comment by stuxnet79
7 hours ago
Rather than focus on brand, I'd recommend developing a better eye and learning how to identify durable, high quality fabrics.
While looking at the brand might be a good heuristic to rely on in the short term, the temptation is too high for vendors to take advantage of their brand power to offload cheaper fabrics for higher margins, I'm looking at you H&M and UNIQLO ...
H&M is awful, but Uniqlo has some great products that will last. I’m a big fan of a few of their t-shirts, especially the heavy cotton tees. You really gotta get your hands on each product to know what’s worth the money though.
Uniqlo does still have some gems, but it's been rapidly enshittifying. My uniqlo clothes from 2019 are incomparable to what they have today. Some of their stuff is still good, but it's a game of roulette every time, because they'll replace products with very similarly branded new versions that suck.
At least in Australia I haven't had an issue with anything from Uniqlo. Their shirts have lasted longer than almost all the other stores I've bought from.
They do have some polyester crap, but they are better than most at having 100% cotton options.
This matches my experience. 2019 was about the last time you could walk into a Uniqlo, grab an item at random and walk out with something reasonable. Just after that we had Covid and the everything bubble which broke a lot of companies. Uniqlo was one of the casualties.
They either had to dramatically increase the price or lower the quality of their stock. It is pretty obvious which choice they made. You get what you pay for.
Along these lines, watch these two videos from Bernadette Banner to learn how to identify fabric types and learn how to identify quality features in clothing:
https://youtu.be/qtJ5ukWundY?si=xzOyiwrrt8oTgpii
https://youtu.be/fuVU64m1sbw?si=5reXwGwVu2j5pTL1
And this where the (independent!) physical store shines. I wish we had more discerning tradesmen these days. Something important went with the brick and mortar stores.
Some of these exist now in the form of (maybe) physical store (or online-only) plus youtube personality, of course.
It's even more complicated. Many brands don't manufacture their own products. Or only manufacture some of them. They license to many manufacturers, typically. The same manufacturer may make the same or similar products for multiple brands too, even further complicating things.
As you've said, you really can't judge by the brand.
I went through an Uniqlo last month and was very disappointed at how just about every sort of basic article of clothing I was looking for was at least 30% polyester. Polyester has its place, the fact its not breathable and cheap does make it genuinely useful in moderation to help warm certain articles, but I don't want it in every single basic t shirt and pair of pants.
You can still get high quality or at the very least 100% Cotton clothes there but you'll have to seek them out and they know people will pay a premium for them so they tend to be 2x or more the price of the popular Airism t shirts for example.
I did give up entirely on trying to find outerwear there that was at least roughly >80% organic materials like cotton or wool which was probably my biggest disappointment. You can find nice basics with good quality fabrics at many brands. But Uniqlo 10 years ago was my favorite for wintertime because they're one of the few that had affordable coats and outerwear that made use of real wool + down with good quality lining, excellent heat-tech jackets that used a great blend of breathable fabric + artificial ones to keep you warm but not sweating. I've worn an Uniqlo duffel coat, peacoat, and several jackets every year for the better part of a decade and they still hold up excellent besides some pilling on the coats that I haven't fixed yet.
They don't even really seem to carry proper coats anymore in their stores nor decent jackets, everything seems like the cheap polyester fleeces and puffer coats that everyone else has.
Cotton _is_ more expensive than polyester, just as a raw material. That's pretty much the whole reason they put it in clothes. So the fact that 100% cotton is more expensive than a cotton poly blend is not surprising or unreasonable.
I had a fascination with 100% cotton clothing about ten years ago. These days I don’t. I’m working out a lot more and I care more about quick-drying and moisture-wicking fabrics. I suppose I’m a victim of the athleisure trend where athletic wear becomes everyday wear.
I sweat a lot and as a result try to avoid cotton for the most part. Wool is just a far better material in my experience, and doesn’t hold odor like cotton.