[lamasery]

I think there's a lot of hidden inflation in this. Or, if not outright inflation, something similar to it.

Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.

You want a button-up shirt that isn't total shit? Over $100. On clearance.

You "can" dress in cheaper alternatives, but those are so bad that their equivalent in the 1930s effectively didn't exist as a new product. You'd be looking at second- or third-hand good (by modern standards, not necessarily anything remarkable for the time, see again those work shirts) clothes, or some simply-constructed homemade garment.

On the plus(?) side we now have clothes so cheap that even though they develop holes or split seams within months, they're not worth repairing even for fairly-poor people, which is... something.

Dressing yourself in new clothes is a lot cheaper now. Dressing yourself in the same quality of new clothes? Maybe not.

[EDIT: This goes for plenty of stuff that's not clothes, and with more-recent products to compare them to. I've learned though my wife buying toys for our kids that modern standard-tier Barbies are trash compared to the ones from the '80s, fewer points of articulation, far worse cloth for the clothes, weaker construction, and fewer pieces of clothing or other accessories included. You have to buy from "fancier" Barbie product lines that are way more expensive, or buy non-Barbie dolls that cost a lot more than a modern entry-level Barbie, to get something that's actually similar to a standard Barbie doll in the '80s. So if you look at just "what did a Barbie cost 40 years ago versus today?" you'll get a misleading idea of how those costs have changed, because the actual comp to a modern standard-tier Barbie is some terrible, cheap Barbie knock-off from the Dollar Tree or wherever, in 1986; the cost to get the same-quality product, regardless of brand, has increased a lot more than whatever the cost difference is between a basic 1986 Barbie and a basic 2026 Barbie]

[AlexB138]

This is such an important point. So much of inflation is not $THING used to cost $X and now costs $Y, but that $THING is significantly lower quality than it used to be. Quality is famously difficult to quantify (Pirsig), so it is much easier to manipulate it without people noticing. A product that looks the same, but is slightly worse, at purchase time is a lot harder to identify than the same product that costs 20% more, so businesses prefer it.

That happens incrementally over years, until the product is a shadow of its former self.

[giraffe_lady]

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.

[triceratops]

> 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)

[yk]

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.

[giraffe_lady]

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.

[MSFT_Edging]

Tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

[eesmith]

> physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s

For a supporting example from the Spring and Summer 1929 Sears Catalog at, https://archive.org/details/sears-roebuck-catalog-158-r-1929...

"If it’s a Hercules, it’s the best work shirt on earth! Sales prove it. Deep down in the mine, in the mills and factories, high on the lofty girders of a towering skyscraper, in fact wherever the work is rugged and the going is tough you’ll find Hercules shirts on the backs of hardy men. It is the undisputed choice of a Nation! This shirt is made of heavyweight chambray in closed front style."

87 cents, postpaid. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ says that's $16.80 now. Fabric breaking strength is 62 pounds/inch. The triple stitched seams have a breaking strength of 58 pounds/inch.

The fancy version on that page is $1.00 -- just under $20 now.

Same shirt, Jan. 1935, price now 77 cents, or just under $19 now. https://archive.org/details/CAT31345884/page/140/mode/2up?q=...

"The toughest, ruggedest, man-size shirt we’ve ever sold. Packed full of more strength, stamina and comfort than ever before. Read every feature above! Sanforized Shrunk means perfect fit. All the washings in the world won’t shrink it. WHERE ELSE can you find such a shirt — such a price — such an opportunity?

Where indeed can I buy it now? I ... think I want one.

Dress shirts were about twice to thrice as much, and up to $6 for "radium silk"; 1929 was likely the last year they used that marketing term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_silk

[post-it]

> Look at what it costs to get a work shirt (I mean, for physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s or ordered by the US military in the 1940s, which in neither case could be regarded as super-fancy. You're probably looking at minimum $150.

Of course, this is still cheaper than it was in the 1940s. With my disposable income I could afford to buy a few $150 shirts a month. A worker of my social class in the 1940s could not.

I don't need the quality so I buy $5 Gildan shirts instead. I do buy Made in Canada cat toys for my little guy though. Different priorities.

[wholinator2]

Multiple $150 shirts per month? That's vastly out of range for the vast majority of human beings alive in the United States right now. I know i definitely could not afford a $300-$450/month increase in expenditure, it would literally bankrupt me. I've already had to sell all the stocks i had just to stay afloat renting and eating normal home made good food in a not so expensive city as a relatively high paid graduate student. There's like hundreds of thousands of people in this city making less than I am. Certainly some of them are working physical labor, blue collar jobs. There's a certain tendency to assume that we are the average in income, no matter where we are. And since going back to school and living near $0 savings for years I've learned that what i thought before was very very wrong. Assuming every blue collar worker can afford multiple $150 shirts per month is wild. I'm sure lots of them are well paid, but that's just not realistic for the a huge portion of people working in America now

[pocksuppet]

If your job doesn't cover your rent and food, you are not highly paid. You are, as they say, slave labor.

[IshKebab]

Presumably because as soon as cheap good-enough clothes became available, high quality clothes became a luxury and are priced accordingly.