Comment by giraffe_lady
7 hours ago
I don't know what the right term is but yeah it's not quite inflation. IIRC households pre-ww2 were spending 15% of their budget on clothing, and the farther back you go the higher that gets even to the point where the concept of "budget" breaks down and the entire family's activities were oriented around procuring food and cloth.
Good fabric has always been and is still very expensive! We have created much cheaper alternatives but if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face. Homemade isn't even an alternative here. Most of the cost of good clothing is in the fabric and there's just no way around this.
> if you want the quality your predecessors had you better be prepared to look 15% of your household budget in the face
But why? That would imply productivity in the industry hasn't risen at all. Which isn't true.
Look at televisions, for example. 1% of what they cost in 1960 and 1000x better.
(Don't @ me with "smart TVs have ads now". You know what I really mean)
If we go with that 15% of household budget, that would be something like 10k and people used to buy a lot less clothing back then than they do today, probably less than 10 items a year. Now, if you take 1k you can probably find a tailor who makes you well tailored trousers, and another 1k for a jacket. This is not how we shop for clothing today, the productivity gains go into fast fashion, being able to buy trousers each month.
Tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
I'm not completely sure and I only have the insight of an interested hobbyist here but I don't think it's a single reason.
A lot of it is that the production improvements have mostly been in developing processes for synthetic replacements. Natural fibers are agricultural products: wool comes from sheep, that are raised on land, harvested and processed by skilled laborers, with natural variance in the input & output; linen, cotton, silk different variants of the same constraints. Polyester is not like this and it indeed can scale vastly and be very cheap. Rayon can be produced from basically any cellulose input so same.
So a lot of what would be productive gains have just shifted over to these other modes. Cotton is the main natural fiber the industry focuses on and it is mostly a lot cheaper now than it was in the past.