All clothing is handmade (2022)

Insulation used to be a ton less important—wood and gas heating were cheap, and nobody had air conditioning because it didn't exist yet.

What was more important was the layout of the house, the windows, and the ceiling heights, all being thoughtfully arranged to allow the right kinds of airflow in the right seasons.

Most modern houses in climates like seen in most of the US turn into an unbearable mold-farm of a wet oven if the AC is turned off over the Summer—they depend on AC or they start kinda decaying in place within a year, aside from being unbearable to enter on a hot day. A 1900-construction house that hasn't been updated to something like modern standards is far more comfortable to live in, in those circumstances.

(your broader point that some things in modern houses are better due to e.g. improving materials or engineering even as other things like framing have gotten worse due to worsening materials, I don't dispute, but modern house design as far as airtightness and insulation is very much a trade-off that leaves them dependent on AC in many—and, as the Earth warms, ever-more—climates, not strictly an improvement)

The old family farm, in Indiana, had all these short "barns". Because they were from Germany, they couldn't figure out how to build properly footed foundations, in the Indiana wilderness. The result was the bottom logs of the houses kept rotting out. So, every 10-or-so years, they'd just build a new log cabin. The old log cabin was the new barn. And, yeah, the old growth logs meant most of the cabins were only 4 logs high, since each log was 3' thick, after they were squared up. By the time the cabin rotted out the second log, the last logs were dry enough they'd stop rotting. The farm had a number of these weird, short, log cabin barns.

There's a huge survivorship bias in the overall conversation about old things being better than new things.

The poorly made houses from 100 years ago just aren't there anymore.

The junk clothing from 50 years ago was thrown out.

Old buildings are often stronger because they didn’t have the modelling and precision manufacturing required to make them to an exact standard - instead they were overbuilt.

"Anyone can build a bridge that doesn't fall down. Only engineers build bridges that only barely don't fall down."

wrong, the hight of wood technology and understanding is behind us I have worked on many very old wooden buildings, dateing back to the mid 1700's and learned from the last carpenters and shipwrights, blacksmiths standing who carried those traditions, as things they learned as part of a greater whole. The understanding of how to keep structures dry, and also, how the inevitable condensation and leakage must be shed, is wraped up in tiny details, choices in wood species and specific grain orientations. If you are discussing, settler built homes, then the choices become based on pragmatism and litteral, life/death survival decisions, so things like, a stone fireplace, but @3' the chimney is chinked log or split wood, and I have seen wooden chimney foundations,made from truely massive, huen timbers, dovetailed together, 36" plus timbers,still supporting an in use kitchen apparatus, after 300 years. How is that possible?, simple, site selection, dry but not too dry, with a spring for a well close by, and if you dig into the details, there is plenty of history around choosing "dry wells" just for, basements and larders, non muddy spots for a house, etc. It is a mistake and a disservice to underestimate the sophistication of the many many, hidden details and the consious choices behind them, in our ancestors lives. seaweed, insulation, and "brushing" foundations every fall...... goes on and on

Maybe, but boots for sure are better and cheaper than 100 years ago. I think the only thing that makes this slightly confusing is that what were old mass-produced workwear have become limited-run fashion items, so looking at things like M1918 boots or cowboy boots and comparing to modern Red Wings or Luccheses it's tempting to say "Oh how much more expensive leather-soled brass-hardware hand-tanned full-grain leather boots are now", ignoring that Modern soldiers wear lightweight goretex running shoe-boots and farmers wear cozy neoprene pull-ons with anti-slip soles and carbon fibre toes, both of which cost half of inflation-adjusted prices of the objectively inferior boots of 1925.

That's interesting - I always assumed that "shoddy" and "slipshod" were related since their meanings are so similar, but apparently not!

Thanks for leading me to that definition.

It is unfair you're being downvoted by pointing out my anecdote. I argued the same point, too!

Here's another point: the Greeks used to complain about their students using punctuation & spaces in their scrolls, because it'd rot their pupils' brains; when novels (books!) became popular, academics thought it'd be the downfall of civilization.

New is different; different is bad.

Here is an American made work shirt for $70 https://www.allamericanclothing.com/collections/mens-long-sl... it's in khaki not blue and the cloth is twill vs chambray but thats because twill is a better fabric for the use case.

And as a reminder blue collar work was _an improvement_ over the default which was agricultural work. Most workers in the US could not afford to buy clothing from a catalog in the 1930s.

The dress comparison was as opposed to her peer group who wore clothes made out of seed bags.

> a dress per year

Also keep in mind that the quality and durability of that dress, and similarly-priced clothing of the era, made it possible to not need to buy new every season. That dress could be expected to last for years, longer with simple repairs.

Also, shoes are even worse than clothing for declining price/decreasing quality.

Perhaps the true inflation tracks the price of equivalent shirts

Sears tools were fabricated in American factories. Compare those to Harbor Freight.

The sad thing is, if one wanted to buy tools of any sort that weren't Harbor Freight, you'd go to another store and get the exact same quality but with different colored plastic handles that just cost twice as much. And instead of tool steel, they're made out of whatever pot metal happened to be around that day.

Furniture is now almost always made out of something like cardboard, compared to the real wood that it was constructed from in that era. It would amuse me as a child when I'd watch some old film and the people had all their worldly possessions piled up on top of the Model T or maybe even a cart, and I couldn't at the time understand why they were bothering to do that if they had to flee. Well, because I'd do the same if I could somehow afford dining room chairs that weren't cheap junk.

Someone in another forum was complaining about Pyrex cookware, which is hardly some luxury good itself. Apparently they've not been made of the proper borosillicate glass in a long time, and so they're no longer really oven-safe.

> would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.

one problem though. My clothing would also last noticeably longer if I was hand-washing it. How much longer I don't actually know, but some of the dresses that was passed to me from older generations have never seen the inside of a washing machine. I also can find similar fabric in some stores, so, theoretically, some clothes today would also live for decades.

We have to adjust to washing machines and our washing habits. Some people I know wash their jeans every week. Every. Week. On a high speed. Yeah no shit they would fall apart in a year, that's like 20-30 washings in a year if they had 2 pairs.

> people would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.

I think the point being made by the OP is that it might be a tenable strategy if you were to spend an equivalent portion of your income on said clothes - which would be ‘very expensive’ by modern standards.

I generally assume crowd funded to mean "created by a quasi-outsider with not much industry knowledge who will make simple mistakes that drastically reduce the quality of the product"

I doubt the sears catalog shirt was made by the thousands sitting on warehouse shelves.

Just to be clear: Filson is still "good" quality for the price IMO, but vintage Filson is built like a tank. My button down shirts from 15 years ago have never even needed a button replaced, whereas newer shirt construction from Bangladesh does not seem as strong to me. Material quality is better/heavier for my older shirts.

I'm not sure if they scrapped it, but somewhat recently (a year ago?) I saw that they were trying to facilitate sales of vintage Filson through their site presumably because they see the people who care about quality buying vintage Filson on eBay instead of the newer stuff they're selling.

Also, while it's certainly not the case that "made overseas = lesser quality", Filson's website has a prominently displayed filter/category for "Made in the USA". This is where you can get a really heavy knit sweater for $500 that IMO is worthy of the old Filson name.

This is the same story with everything. Companies all want to take as much as they can possibly squeeze out of you while giving you as little as they can get away with. A few companies start out by charging higher prices for higher quality, often pricing out a large number of consumers, but eventually the greed wins out and they start to cut corners too.

If you're wealthy enough to keep chasing after luxury goods you'll be ripped off at a slower pace than most, but eventually you'll be increasingly disappointed in what you're getting and have to look harder and harder, and pay higher and higher prices for anything nice. The poorest people are stuck paying increasing prices for poisonous products that are basically trash and that's all they can barely afford.

I bought a Saddleback wallet at least 14 years ago, and it's still in pretty good shape. There are a couple of stitches that have broken on the fold, but it's generally ok. Has a nice patina.

Though, it's thick. Really thick. And the card pocket edges are thick enough that they will destroy a credit card in 3 years or so. (Except for the top one on each side, and the hidden slot behind the visible cards.)

I was expecting to use it forever, but between the thickness and just not using nearly as many cards/cash any more, I'll probably give up on it and make a thinner one that's specific to the 3 or 4 cards I use and a stashed bill or two.

(Make because we now have way too much leather because my wife has started making barefoot shoes, and hey stash. Have a really nice leather laptop sleeve now too.)

Same, I've got a few Saddleback pieces including a wallet and it's seen some abuse over the past decade but it's supple and strong with no signs of wearing down anytime soon.

Who knows if their claim of "They'll fight over it when you're dead" is true or not, but can confirm the quality will easily outlast 10 years with no problem.

My question is; Why even have a "wallet" at this point?

My teens use these little things that attach to their phones to hold gym key, debit card and ID.

I use a traditional "wallet" or billfold as my abuelo used to call them, but I am positively a dinosaur using one. Also, the darn thing hurts my back if I leave it in my back pocket while driving/sitting.

Heck, I have been eyeing those crossbody bags or saccoche to hold the things that are in my wallet.

Hot damn this is inspiring!

Also, don’t know about your area, but my local library will let you checkout a sewing machine.

Lots of the modern world still line-dries laundry, but this is exceedingly uncommon in the USA.

I'm Portuguese, and although we have a lot of high quality textiles being produced here and being used by high end designer brands, most Portuguese people are surprised when they see the label.

It's usually a very B2B thing (outdated and vague corporate site, if any) but I've purchased very nice blanks from these factories for very good prices by contacting them directly.

There's also a lot of shoe production, but for this there are well known consumer facing stores so people are more aware.

Yeah totally agree on this. And I think that's should be the example of good product.

Like your parent, I would consider that cars are, in the same sense, "hand made" both including the small runs of luxury cars (which are "hand made" in the sense where parts might not fit properly because the panel was made by Steve on Monday morning, and he got the measurements a bit wrong) and a generic mid-range SUV that Ford churned out in huge numbers where a "production line" still has humans working on every vehicle, even though they have machines to help them do a consistent job.

We should distinguish two kinds of weaving machine, fortunately my sister is a textile artist so I have to hand exactly the best examples. A few minutes walk from her home is Saltaire, which today is a tourist attraction but was historically economically important. Titus Salt's mill, for which the village provides housing and so on, had the second kind of weaving machine. The Mill produced fabric much like you'd see today, yards and yards of identical material woven at incredible speed.

But for centuries before such mills were built, the first kind of weaving machine had existed. You won't see many in use today, some kinds of University might show them to students, a few museums have one that can be demonstrated. But on the Outer Hebrides there are lots, and that's because Harris Tweed is specifically required to be made this way, on those islands, the same way Champagne has to be made in a specific way in a particular region of France.

It is in principle possible for humans to literally weave fabrics by hand, but it's ridiculously laborious, so the first machine (the one used to make Harris Tweed) makes a lot of sense. But if we're going to (and ordinarily people do) insist this counts as Hand Weaving then it seems also reasonable to say that operating a sewing machine to make a pair of jeans is also hand making clothes.

[Edited to simplify + clarify last sentence]

I obviously meant sewn by hand, using a sewing machine. Not by a robot. The fabric is cut and passed through a machine by a human.

Fabric stretches. That makes it very hard to accurately handle. A size 6 dress needs to be the same size and fit as every other size 6 dress from your brand since if someone likes one they might buy more. (there is no need to be the same as someone else's size 6, but it needs to match your other size 6s)

By the usual definitions of highly engineered, nope, it's not. In today's term it is a low-complexity commodity/consumer good. Sure, multiple hands may touch it during the manufacturing process but its low complexity even with machines involved. Each step can be measured and the combined product does not have multiple workflows going into it.

A highly engineered good would a jet engine, an MRI machine or similar. Multiple teams, steps that may be hard to measure and perhaps quality output that may not be fully measured until the end product is put together.

Not sure why you would think otherwise.

It is not a disagreement with the idea but its definitely not a good apples to apples comparison. I guess it fits well with certain narratives people love.