[bilbo0s]

You still have massive downsides to new cotton or wool clothes. There's just less of the micro plastic downside. Clothing is just a place where we take a massive hit on everything from carbon output to micro plastics.

Another issue is clothing repair. I think the clothing repair thing is kind of brilliant. But for clothing repair to work you would need to disincentivize buying new clothes. Which subsidizing clothing would work against.

[JumpCrisscross]

> for clothing repair to work you would need to disincentivize buying new clothes

Why? I repair clothes. I also like buying new ones. In between I ruin and lose items, or find that I no longer wish to wear them for purely stylistic reasons.

[pkaye]

Higher quality clothes like in the past might be nice. Stuff seems to fall apart so quickly these days.

[ffujdefvjg]

Older clothes weren't just made better, people also took care of them better. Partly because of cost, but also culture -- fewer changes in fashion trends with slower and more local communication, cheap labor to launder your clothes by hand (which puts much less wear on the garment). Also a culture of repairing and mending (also easier to do this when you have fewer things to occupy your free time).

[jabl]

Yes. But really, it was much worse in many ways. A 100 years ago, say, the people doing clothes repair for a living were desperately poor, and often being single women they often had to resort to prostitution to feed themselves as the income from repairing clothes simply wasn't enough.

I do think that from an environmental standpoint we should repair and recycle clothes a lot more than we do, but lets not romanticize the past. The small clothes repair businesses disappeared for a reason as living standards improved. Furthermore, today factory production of clothes is incredibly efficient and tends to be done in low-income countries, further making it even harder to restart some kind of clothes repair industry in high-income countries.

[baq]

sad truth: dryers absolutely destroy clothes.