Comment by gbear605
20 hours ago
Cloth absolutely has gotten worse over the last two hundred years since industrialization. It's also orders of magnitude cheaper, making it worth it, and certainly new types of cloth are available that weren't before, but we're not better off in every possible way.
>but we're not better off in every possible way
I'd argue that we are, because cloth of higher quality than anything that has ever existed before is available today, it's just really expensive. But high quality cloth was also expensive back then.
I think you are making the error of comparing cheap clothes of today with expensive clothes of the past, rather than cheap clothes with cheap clothes and expensive with expensive. People of the past might have had higher quality clothes on average, but its because those clothes were expensive despite being the cheapest available. Trust me, if Shein was around in 1780, everyone would be wearing that garbage.
We're definitely worse off when fabric now is mostly synthetic fabrics that flood the environment with microplastics, and last a much shorter amount of time. Of course, that's good for the fashion industry since it means they can sell more often.
Is there any type of clothing that existed in the 1800s that you could actually not buy or have custom made today?
On the other hand, you could not buy a Gore-Tex Pro shell or an ultralight down jacket for any price in 1800.
Dhaka muslin most famously isn't producible today due to a lack of knowledge. More broadly a lot of weaving techniques have been lost since they don’t make sense to do with machinery.
I don’t disagree that there are a lot of gains, including on net, just that it hasn’t been a pareto improvement with no losses at all.