This is the weekend edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
I love how you put this together, heartbreaking as it is (I get queasy thinking about how much the house + property across from me just sold for in Whitefish).
A long time ago I did a work-for-hire gig writing a 6th-grade math/social studies textbook on the Great Depression. I had to find lots of numbers for the math problems. The research was *fascinating*, especially the details on inflation, prices of necessities, the explosion of credit to buy new luxuries like radios, and how Social Security was designed in its midst to get men to work and women to marry (has not been updated BTW!). Also an NYT front-page article on Eleanor Roosevelt making the case for housewives to get minimum wage. And the parallels for our times were pretty stark (this was a couple of years before the 2008 crash).
In other words, these numbers tell a big story and make me sad :(
I've dove into the world of sewing reddit and instagram over the past few months, and it has really opened my eyes as to a) the amount of labor that goes into making a garment, even accounting for industrial process and b) how exploitative fast fashion is. Layer on the environmental impacts of some fabrics and you find yourself attempting to make your own wardrobe and buying 50$ fair-trade organic t-shirts.
Totally! It's amazing how taking on fun projects to knit various items has had the added benefit of giving me such a healthy appreciation and perspective on what goes into the whole concept of a piece of clothing - - the amount of time, the materials, the equipment/tools.
I think about the price of clothing a lot. Clothing is supposed to be expensive. Karolina Zebrowska had to make a video to explain that that the existence of the original Strawberry Dress, a well-made fancy dress that costs $490, is not oppression.
If a small business/artisan makes clothing, pays employees fairly, and sets prices fairly, they are not oppressing us. We need to blame our own low wages and the inflated cost of rent and healthcare instead. Fast fashion has distorted the true cost of clothing to the point that makers can get brigaded online for setting prices fairly.
i love this. i've never commented here, but i came to make two quick observations that don't undermine your larger point at all, just for when or if you go to formalize these thoughts:
- i wonder if this 1935 budget is for ready-to-wear clothes or not, especially dresses. 1935 seems like a weird tipping point where most women still sewed their own clothing, or had the capacity to do so; but college coeds probably would be the market for ready-to-wear (hence the "some live on less" comment).
- tacomas are a bit of a weird example for the used car point, b/c there was already a thriving used market for tacomas pre-covid (they're a bit like wranglers, where people have preferences for a particular model/year, and they hold their value well)
welcome to our always entertaining comment section! 1) see above re: interesting points about 1935, and I bet there are dissertations about what was going on with women's fashion and price points at that moment; 2) Tacomas are TOTALLY a weird market (I know this because all I want in life is a 1999 Tacoma to own for the rest of my life, preferably a stick shift) but my car knowledgable sources tell me that the entire used market for any smaller truck is similarly wild, in part because the new trucks are SO BIG and SO EXPENSIVE
Trucks are so weird because 80%+ of people that own them don't need them, I think. At least where I live in small town Kansas it's very much a marker of masculinity. Of course there are women with pickups, but mostly they are boys and men. It's wild to see high school boys drive 15 miles each way to school in a pickup that gets 112-15 mpg when they could have a same year Toyota Corolla that gets 25 or 30. Also trucks have gotten SO big. Cars and trucks are status symbols more than they are tools for many of us.
This is both true and yet trucks can be really useful. We’re a 1-car family (Subaru), but had been wanting a truck for years for camping, hauling bikes around, etc. Even having access to those things is a privilege, but it is nice to be able to have the extra haulage capacity when we need it. I was holding out for an electric truck for the last 5 years but we finally bought a 1979 Chevy off of a friend. I know lots of people who use their trucks as their main car but unless you work in construction it seems an incredible waste of money and resources.
We are also a one car household, and I want a beater truck for the same reasons. There *is* utility. But I don't need it to, say, drive across Montana.
Exactly! My main goal was “paddleboard transport mechanism,” though the Subaru racks work for most purposes. Also hunting. That’s the only time of year we can make reasonable use of two vehicles.
on trucks - EXACTLY this. We bought a Tacoma a couple of years ago (which was what we wanted anyway, but when test driving cars there's a bit of hedonism that kicks in "Suuuuure i'll definitely check out the Super XL version") and i just remember how enormous and expensive and actually un-truck-like so many of the other options were. Like I clearly remember test driving a truck that had its own wifi (????). Y'all, we just wanna be those friends who you call when you need to move a couch, you know?
but i also know that part of the giant truck trend is probably not helped by the fact that people who identify/categorize as farmers can write SUVs / trucks off their taxes as "farm vehicles". 🙄
Just want to point out that both Patagonia and the Christy Dawn dress only go to a XXL, but the Target dress presumably goes to a 4x. So many people are excluded from more sustainable brands. Also the price for used cars are insane, even compared to just 10 years ago. The cost for childcare isn’t very transparent if you’re just thinking about having kids, so I feel like it’s something hard to plan for.
A very good point — when I asked about Christy Dawn the other day on Twitter (I had been getting a lot of ads, and I wanted to know others' experience) a lot of the feedback was about how they *are* inclusively sized, and that plus-size influencers like them (https://twitter.com/kfoley_charms/status/1374910141858938882?s=20). It's still exceptional to even go to XXL, which says something, doesn't it.
Fascinating stuff, as always. Is there a verb for what a concierge does? A concierge of cultural information?
I wanted to second the recommendation of the linked piece about The Eyes of Texas. I probably wouldn't have read it if I hadn't felt a connection to the song,* but that would have been a mistake. This is as comprehensive a take down of a respected institution's lame 'dammit we're not racists!' effort as I've ever seen anywhere. The song has simply go to go.
Man writes a parody song for a single college glee club show as an undergrad, dies more than 40 years later, and every obituary -- and I think he had more than a dozen -- lists this one thing about his life. And 70 years after that, people are analyzing a few days from the man's life, among other things, to decide just how racist his song is. One doesn't want to live one's life with a looming concern about how any specific thing we do is going to outlive us, but boy howdy is this a cautionary tale. And the song has got to go.
* I'm not an alum of UT, but know some, and certainly knew the song well as an elementary school kid growing up in Texas. What I hadn't know until long after is that my grandmother's second cousin had married the fellow who wrote the song. (She's quoted in the linked article).
I have long wanted to see more coverage about sustainability in fashion and its connection to climate change. I've been wondering how it will shake out in the next few years as people start buying clothes again – will the shifts that consumers made during the pandemic continue, or not? There's such a huge emphasis on ESG investment right now as a tool to fight climate change. How does apparel fit into that? And I'm curious about how B Corps have weathered the pandemic versus other comparably-sized companies. (Patagonia was one, and was the first in California.) I've never looked closely at their filings, but I suspect it leans heavily on a sustainable supply chain to get the B Corp designation.
would love to see a big analysis of how B Corps fared during the pandemic — and I just generally want to see a paradigm shift when it comes to thinking about clothes, but it is so so so hard to unlearn ideas about clothes "should" cost (aka, they should be as cheap as possible). I look at $218 for a dress and want to faint, but I shouldn't! That's the cost of paying a living wage! I should just buy one of those dresses for every four dresses I'm tempted to buy at 40% off from J.Crew or whatever
I work in sewn product manufacturing (at a B Corp!), and honestly that Ashley Dawn dress cost seemed low to me for a US-produced garment. I looked up photos of the Dawn dress and while it is relatively simple, it has a lot of elements that take time in production. First of all, it's a dress, so just the cutting of it is not super quick (even with stack cutting like we do in my factory--skirts are big pieces). Second, it has a lot of simple details that take time: front and back yokes, gathering at both the front and back yokes, the back yoke has decorative seaming, there is a sewn channel for the waist ties that includes buttonholes for the ties to come out of, and the waist ties themselves. These are all seemingly small details that give this dress its style, but make it far from a quick piece to cut and sew...only 2.5 hours to make seems incredibly fast to me!
On top of just the cut/sew making that price seem like a bargain, the overhead of $9 seems super low. Granted they may be making thousands of these dresses (I have no idea), which means the initial development cost: design, patternmaking, fit testing, etc., may be down to pennies/unit at this point, so overhead may truly only be operational costs plus marketing, but for most clothing lines that initial development is a significant part of the per/item cost. It can be anywhere from $5k-$15K just to get a single style (dress, skirt, etc.) to the point of being "production-ready," i.e. able to be factory-produced. Which adds a lot of $$/unit when the total number of units being produced is anything less than hundreds.
Mostly though, we are just so removed from the process of how clothes are made that the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into making them is unknown to most people. I am still always surprised how often even the clients at my work (i.e. people who really should know better) don't understand that actual humans do all of the work involved in making every single item.
I have only rudimentary sewing skills (but have studied a lot of dress patterns, which is a story for another day) and thought the same. Thank you for giving such a detailed breakdown!
I have an Italian friend who has both amazing clothes and an ethos around buying clothes that I am trying to emulate. She buys beautifully made items (that I would consider very expensive) then wears them almost every day on repeat. Her wardrobe is extremely limited, built to last, and she looks great. I am sure she also spends less on clothing than I do. I guess this is a version of a capsule wardrobe, but somehow that trend smacks of sneaky capitalism. Maybe I find it more palatable because she’s Italian? :) I find myself amassing clothes and not wearing the things I love every day because I’ve somehow bought into the twisted idea that I can’t wear things over and over again. It’s crazy and stupid and I feel like it’s another way I’ve been duped/trapped.
I have a very vivid memory of being deeply befuddled by the head of my French study abroad program, a gorgeous woman in her early 60s who essentially wore the same thing for a week at a time. She always looked impeccable. Me, discovering H&M for the first time — very much less so.
My French host family was really similar. The mom had like 4 gorgeous sweaters and wore them on repeat. Meanwhile, I was an American with a giant suitcase. Funnily, as I get older, I lean more towards the repeat.
Is a markup of 3-4 times when sold ONLINE the real cost? I’ve been invested in Amazon since the beginning and I promise you he built early confidence by promising that online sales destroys the markup.
It’s worked well for him until he became market leader and started pushing prices. I’m not sure 3-4 markup for online has much to do with living wage.
82 pounds of clothes a year?! Did I read that right? What Americans are those? I don’t even own 82 pounds of clothes! And there are thrift stores that recycle all that fabric into various materials used by all kinds of organizations. Sheesh.
And don’t get me started on sub minimum wage for disabled workers. It’s no wonder we get the idea that disabled workers must be non-essential during a public health crisis. If we pay them less, regardless of what job they do, they’ll be considered as less than. It’s really quite easy to figure out. Infuriating but easy.
I am self-employed and work at home, and tend to buy mostly boring, sturdy clothing from places like LL Bean and Lands' End. I wear stuff until it's pretty much worn out (which can take years!). I am itching to buy some new clothes this year, and wasn't sure what to do with my old garments, many of which aren't really in good enough shape to donate to a thrift store. After a lot of searching, I found this site: https://fordays.com/take-back-bag You can buy a bag for $10, fill it with clean used clothing, send it back to them (shipping is included in the $10 price), and they guarantee it won't end up in a landfill. I ordered 2 bags, and they're large enough to hold a lot of stuff. Anyway, thought this might interest folks who are interested in sustainability.
Thank you, it's just what I need. It's getting harder and harder to donate clothing, and I've been looking for recycling options.
I'm all for boring and sturdy. And for the past year I've been living in jeans, am upscaling to Lands End knit pants as transitioning out of "pandemic wear" into semi-suitable for work among people.
Slightly random comment about the college girls wardrobe in 1935: At that time only about a quarter of the population finished high school, let alone went to college. So the college girls wardrobe you’re describing here is a thrifty rich girls wardrobe, not a thrifty girls wardrobe
No this is a great point! What generally drew me to the stat is just the idea that you would have four new dresses for the year, and a normalized higher price point for them. This is really interesting for moderate income family clothing data: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0789_1944.pdf
What I found really fascinating in this document was the comment that it was difficult to run year on year comparisons of the cost of womenswear Because changing fashions made it so difficult to directly compare garment quality
I say this because one thing that has been living rent free in my head for easily 20 years is when I found out Martha Stewart was written up in Glamour as #1 in their top 10 most best dressed college girls in 1961:
Yeah, I wasn’t debating whether women were wearing dresses in 1935, but whether a high allotment of the budget to new dresses was due to beauty being a large part of a woman’s worth, and by extension, whether college in 1935 was also a means for these women to join a better marriage market
This is why I almost exclusively buy used clothing (and used more generally). Money spent at my local charity shops go directly to local families in need and it saves the clothes from going straight to the landfill. Money spent in my local community means I’m not giving my hard earned cash to (normally) absurdly rich white men who exploit workers and usurp independent communities. Shopping used means I do not participate in the cycle of buying new, stripping the environment, supporting labor that is basically indentured servitude, etc. Charity shops also frequently accept grocery and shopping bags, boxes and packing paper, etc., which is a great way to recycle things besides clothing that normally end up straight in the trash. Finally, and most importantly, local charities that I support have moral values that I also hold. I have seen the staff at Habitat for Humanity give bags to poor families and just tell them to fill the bags with children’s clothes without charging them anything. This is the kind of shopping that I love.
I should specify: the Habitat for Humanity kindness I saw occurred during back to school month and clearly the staff knew this family (and many of the other families in the store..they also knew me).
I wish everything written everywhere about salary and minimum wage would include this kind of cost-of-living breakdown. I think the concept of just how terrible wages are sometimes get lost for people who aren't living it.
The transit stuff bounces around in my head all of the time, and it all goes back to how our cities are designed. I WANT to ride my bike or take the bus everywhere. But, my mid-sized Southern city does not make it very safe to ride my bike outside very contained areas, and while the city has been aggressive about adding bike lanes where it can, for the most part the roads aren't designed to accommodate bike lanes and are too dangerous to ride without them. The bus ride to cover my 13-mile commute would take 2.5 hours one way because the bus system doesn't have enough routes going to the right places frequently enough (and I live in a transit-heavy neighborhood and work in a fairly dense business district -- theoretically I have one of the best setups for public transit.) The public transit thing is such a chicken/egg conundrum. More ridership would provide more fares and incentive for better/more routes, but they can't attract more riders without better/more routes.
Wow - I've never heard of Christy Dawn. This is the first time I've seen a breakdown of cost transparency per item like this. Pretty cool. Anyone know of other companies doing this in their customer-facing communications? Does anyone who knows more than me about clothing production (me = 0 knowledge) trust this cost breakdown?
I love how you put this together, heartbreaking as it is (I get queasy thinking about how much the house + property across from me just sold for in Whitefish).
A long time ago I did a work-for-hire gig writing a 6th-grade math/social studies textbook on the Great Depression. I had to find lots of numbers for the math problems. The research was *fascinating*, especially the details on inflation, prices of necessities, the explosion of credit to buy new luxuries like radios, and how Social Security was designed in its midst to get men to work and women to marry (has not been updated BTW!). Also an NYT front-page article on Eleanor Roosevelt making the case for housewives to get minimum wage. And the parallels for our times were pretty stark (this was a couple of years before the 2008 crash).
In other words, these numbers tell a big story and make me sad :(
I've dove into the world of sewing reddit and instagram over the past few months, and it has really opened my eyes as to a) the amount of labor that goes into making a garment, even accounting for industrial process and b) how exploitative fast fashion is. Layer on the environmental impacts of some fabrics and you find yourself attempting to make your own wardrobe and buying 50$ fair-trade organic t-shirts.
Totally! It's amazing how taking on fun projects to knit various items has had the added benefit of giving me such a healthy appreciation and perspective on what goes into the whole concept of a piece of clothing - - the amount of time, the materials, the equipment/tools.
I think about the price of clothing a lot. Clothing is supposed to be expensive. Karolina Zebrowska had to make a video to explain that that the existence of the original Strawberry Dress, a well-made fancy dress that costs $490, is not oppression.
https://youtu.be/Sk4YNRip_dM
If a small business/artisan makes clothing, pays employees fairly, and sets prices fairly, they are not oppressing us. We need to blame our own low wages and the inflated cost of rent and healthcare instead. Fast fashion has distorted the true cost of clothing to the point that makers can get brigaded online for setting prices fairly.
This is such a great way of putting this
i love this. i've never commented here, but i came to make two quick observations that don't undermine your larger point at all, just for when or if you go to formalize these thoughts:
- i wonder if this 1935 budget is for ready-to-wear clothes or not, especially dresses. 1935 seems like a weird tipping point where most women still sewed their own clothing, or had the capacity to do so; but college coeds probably would be the market for ready-to-wear (hence the "some live on less" comment).
- tacomas are a bit of a weird example for the used car point, b/c there was already a thriving used market for tacomas pre-covid (they're a bit like wranglers, where people have preferences for a particular model/year, and they hold their value well)
welcome to our always entertaining comment section! 1) see above re: interesting points about 1935, and I bet there are dissertations about what was going on with women's fashion and price points at that moment; 2) Tacomas are TOTALLY a weird market (I know this because all I want in life is a 1999 Tacoma to own for the rest of my life, preferably a stick shift) but my car knowledgable sources tell me that the entire used market for any smaller truck is similarly wild, in part because the new trucks are SO BIG and SO EXPENSIVE
Trucks are so weird because 80%+ of people that own them don't need them, I think. At least where I live in small town Kansas it's very much a marker of masculinity. Of course there are women with pickups, but mostly they are boys and men. It's wild to see high school boys drive 15 miles each way to school in a pickup that gets 112-15 mpg when they could have a same year Toyota Corolla that gets 25 or 30. Also trucks have gotten SO big. Cars and trucks are status symbols more than they are tools for many of us.
The middle aged city equivalent seems to be luxury SUVs as status symbols.
This is both true and yet trucks can be really useful. We’re a 1-car family (Subaru), but had been wanting a truck for years for camping, hauling bikes around, etc. Even having access to those things is a privilege, but it is nice to be able to have the extra haulage capacity when we need it. I was holding out for an electric truck for the last 5 years but we finally bought a 1979 Chevy off of a friend. I know lots of people who use their trucks as their main car but unless you work in construction it seems an incredible waste of money and resources.
We are also a one car household, and I want a beater truck for the same reasons. There *is* utility. But I don't need it to, say, drive across Montana.
Exactly! My main goal was “paddleboard transport mechanism,” though the Subaru racks work for most purposes. Also hunting. That’s the only time of year we can make reasonable use of two vehicles.
I feel this SO much, both for the rural area in which I grew up and sometimes in the city in which I now live.
on trucks - EXACTLY this. We bought a Tacoma a couple of years ago (which was what we wanted anyway, but when test driving cars there's a bit of hedonism that kicks in "Suuuuure i'll definitely check out the Super XL version") and i just remember how enormous and expensive and actually un-truck-like so many of the other options were. Like I clearly remember test driving a truck that had its own wifi (????). Y'all, we just wanna be those friends who you call when you need to move a couch, you know?
but i also know that part of the giant truck trend is probably not helped by the fact that people who identify/categorize as farmers can write SUVs / trucks off their taxes as "farm vehicles". 🙄
anyway these are not gripes just my literal 2 cents; i am going to let the rest of these facts and figures bounce around my head for a while
Trucks too
Here I am just minding my own business on a rainy Sunday afternoon and Anne walks into my apartment and slaps me hard across the face
Just want to point out that both Patagonia and the Christy Dawn dress only go to a XXL, but the Target dress presumably goes to a 4x. So many people are excluded from more sustainable brands. Also the price for used cars are insane, even compared to just 10 years ago. The cost for childcare isn’t very transparent if you’re just thinking about having kids, so I feel like it’s something hard to plan for.
A very good point — when I asked about Christy Dawn the other day on Twitter (I had been getting a lot of ads, and I wanted to know others' experience) a lot of the feedback was about how they *are* inclusively sized, and that plus-size influencers like them (https://twitter.com/kfoley_charms/status/1374910141858938882?s=20). It's still exceptional to even go to XXL, which says something, doesn't it.
Ah, okay! I guess I’m so used to brands not being inclusive that I didn’t investigate too far.
No, this isn't to counter your point at all! Just that even the quote unquote "good" inclusive brands still stop at XXL.
Fascinating stuff, as always. Is there a verb for what a concierge does? A concierge of cultural information?
I wanted to second the recommendation of the linked piece about The Eyes of Texas. I probably wouldn't have read it if I hadn't felt a connection to the song,* but that would have been a mistake. This is as comprehensive a take down of a respected institution's lame 'dammit we're not racists!' effort as I've ever seen anywhere. The song has simply go to go.
Man writes a parody song for a single college glee club show as an undergrad, dies more than 40 years later, and every obituary -- and I think he had more than a dozen -- lists this one thing about his life. And 70 years after that, people are analyzing a few days from the man's life, among other things, to decide just how racist his song is. One doesn't want to live one's life with a looming concern about how any specific thing we do is going to outlive us, but boy howdy is this a cautionary tale. And the song has got to go.
* I'm not an alum of UT, but know some, and certainly knew the song well as an elementary school kid growing up in Texas. What I hadn't know until long after is that my grandmother's second cousin had married the fellow who wrote the song. (She's quoted in the linked article).
I have long wanted to see more coverage about sustainability in fashion and its connection to climate change. I've been wondering how it will shake out in the next few years as people start buying clothes again – will the shifts that consumers made during the pandemic continue, or not? There's such a huge emphasis on ESG investment right now as a tool to fight climate change. How does apparel fit into that? And I'm curious about how B Corps have weathered the pandemic versus other comparably-sized companies. (Patagonia was one, and was the first in California.) I've never looked closely at their filings, but I suspect it leans heavily on a sustainable supply chain to get the B Corp designation.
would love to see a big analysis of how B Corps fared during the pandemic — and I just generally want to see a paradigm shift when it comes to thinking about clothes, but it is so so so hard to unlearn ideas about clothes "should" cost (aka, they should be as cheap as possible). I look at $218 for a dress and want to faint, but I shouldn't! That's the cost of paying a living wage! I should just buy one of those dresses for every four dresses I'm tempted to buy at 40% off from J.Crew or whatever
I work in sewn product manufacturing (at a B Corp!), and honestly that Ashley Dawn dress cost seemed low to me for a US-produced garment. I looked up photos of the Dawn dress and while it is relatively simple, it has a lot of elements that take time in production. First of all, it's a dress, so just the cutting of it is not super quick (even with stack cutting like we do in my factory--skirts are big pieces). Second, it has a lot of simple details that take time: front and back yokes, gathering at both the front and back yokes, the back yoke has decorative seaming, there is a sewn channel for the waist ties that includes buttonholes for the ties to come out of, and the waist ties themselves. These are all seemingly small details that give this dress its style, but make it far from a quick piece to cut and sew...only 2.5 hours to make seems incredibly fast to me!
On top of just the cut/sew making that price seem like a bargain, the overhead of $9 seems super low. Granted they may be making thousands of these dresses (I have no idea), which means the initial development cost: design, patternmaking, fit testing, etc., may be down to pennies/unit at this point, so overhead may truly only be operational costs plus marketing, but for most clothing lines that initial development is a significant part of the per/item cost. It can be anywhere from $5k-$15K just to get a single style (dress, skirt, etc.) to the point of being "production-ready," i.e. able to be factory-produced. Which adds a lot of $$/unit when the total number of units being produced is anything less than hundreds.
Mostly though, we are just so removed from the process of how clothes are made that the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into making them is unknown to most people. I am still always surprised how often even the clients at my work (i.e. people who really should know better) don't understand that actual humans do all of the work involved in making every single item.
I have only rudimentary sewing skills (but have studied a lot of dress patterns, which is a story for another day) and thought the same. Thank you for giving such a detailed breakdown!
Thank you for breaking this down so thoroughly. Fascinating.
"Ashley Dawn"? yikes. My only excuse is that I was rull tired.
This is absolutely awesome and also I’m reminded of why I failed home ec twice and am always grateful to people who know how to sew!
I have an Italian friend who has both amazing clothes and an ethos around buying clothes that I am trying to emulate. She buys beautifully made items (that I would consider very expensive) then wears them almost every day on repeat. Her wardrobe is extremely limited, built to last, and she looks great. I am sure she also spends less on clothing than I do. I guess this is a version of a capsule wardrobe, but somehow that trend smacks of sneaky capitalism. Maybe I find it more palatable because she’s Italian? :) I find myself amassing clothes and not wearing the things I love every day because I’ve somehow bought into the twisted idea that I can’t wear things over and over again. It’s crazy and stupid and I feel like it’s another way I’ve been duped/trapped.
I have a very vivid memory of being deeply befuddled by the head of my French study abroad program, a gorgeous woman in her early 60s who essentially wore the same thing for a week at a time. She always looked impeccable. Me, discovering H&M for the first time — very much less so.
My French host family was really similar. The mom had like 4 gorgeous sweaters and wore them on repeat. Meanwhile, I was an American with a giant suitcase. Funnily, as I get older, I lean more towards the repeat.
How do they do that? And also, the scarves!!!
Is a markup of 3-4 times when sold ONLINE the real cost? I’ve been invested in Amazon since the beginning and I promise you he built early confidence by promising that online sales destroys the markup.
It’s worked well for him until he became market leader and started pushing prices. I’m not sure 3-4 markup for online has much to do with living wage.
82 pounds of clothes a year?! Did I read that right? What Americans are those? I don’t even own 82 pounds of clothes! And there are thrift stores that recycle all that fabric into various materials used by all kinds of organizations. Sheesh.
And don’t get me started on sub minimum wage for disabled workers. It’s no wonder we get the idea that disabled workers must be non-essential during a public health crisis. If we pay them less, regardless of what job they do, they’ll be considered as less than. It’s really quite easy to figure out. Infuriating but easy.
This week's Just Trust Me kind of ripped me wide open.
I agree. What a beautiful piece of writing.
I am self-employed and work at home, and tend to buy mostly boring, sturdy clothing from places like LL Bean and Lands' End. I wear stuff until it's pretty much worn out (which can take years!). I am itching to buy some new clothes this year, and wasn't sure what to do with my old garments, many of which aren't really in good enough shape to donate to a thrift store. After a lot of searching, I found this site: https://fordays.com/take-back-bag You can buy a bag for $10, fill it with clean used clothing, send it back to them (shipping is included in the $10 price), and they guarantee it won't end up in a landfill. I ordered 2 bags, and they're large enough to hold a lot of stuff. Anyway, thought this might interest folks who are interested in sustainability.
Thank you, it's just what I need. It's getting harder and harder to donate clothing, and I've been looking for recycling options.
I'm all for boring and sturdy. And for the past year I've been living in jeans, am upscaling to Lands End knit pants as transitioning out of "pandemic wear" into semi-suitable for work among people.
BTW, this is a good article on how part of fashion’s sustainability problem is how little data we actually have about the true environmental costs:
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/1/27/21080107/fashion-environment-facts-statistics-impact
Slightly random comment about the college girls wardrobe in 1935: At that time only about a quarter of the population finished high school, let alone went to college. So the college girls wardrobe you’re describing here is a thrifty rich girls wardrobe, not a thrifty girls wardrobe
No this is a great point! What generally drew me to the stat is just the idea that you would have four new dresses for the year, and a normalized higher price point for them. This is really interesting for moderate income family clothing data: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0789_1944.pdf
What I found really fascinating in this document was the comment that it was difficult to run year on year comparisons of the cost of womenswear Because changing fashions made it so difficult to directly compare garment quality
Yes!!!
You kind of also wonder if a young woman’s budget was spent largely on dresses so she could go to formal events, etc., in order to meet men
I say this because one thing that has been living rent free in my head for easily 20 years is when I found out Martha Stewart was written up in Glamour as #1 in their top 10 most best dressed college girls in 1961:
https://www.glamour.com/gallery/past-top-ten-college-women
Umm ... no. In 1935 girls wore dresses. It was a big deal when Katharine Hepburn wore slacks as a professional woman in The Philadelphia Story.
Yeah, I wasn’t debating whether women were wearing dresses in 1935, but whether a high allotment of the budget to new dresses was due to beauty being a large part of a woman’s worth, and by extension, whether college in 1935 was also a means for these women to join a better marriage market
This is why I almost exclusively buy used clothing (and used more generally). Money spent at my local charity shops go directly to local families in need and it saves the clothes from going straight to the landfill. Money spent in my local community means I’m not giving my hard earned cash to (normally) absurdly rich white men who exploit workers and usurp independent communities. Shopping used means I do not participate in the cycle of buying new, stripping the environment, supporting labor that is basically indentured servitude, etc. Charity shops also frequently accept grocery and shopping bags, boxes and packing paper, etc., which is a great way to recycle things besides clothing that normally end up straight in the trash. Finally, and most importantly, local charities that I support have moral values that I also hold. I have seen the staff at Habitat for Humanity give bags to poor families and just tell them to fill the bags with children’s clothes without charging them anything. This is the kind of shopping that I love.
I should specify: the Habitat for Humanity kindness I saw occurred during back to school month and clearly the staff knew this family (and many of the other families in the store..they also knew me).
I wish everything written everywhere about salary and minimum wage would include this kind of cost-of-living breakdown. I think the concept of just how terrible wages are sometimes get lost for people who aren't living it.
The transit stuff bounces around in my head all of the time, and it all goes back to how our cities are designed. I WANT to ride my bike or take the bus everywhere. But, my mid-sized Southern city does not make it very safe to ride my bike outside very contained areas, and while the city has been aggressive about adding bike lanes where it can, for the most part the roads aren't designed to accommodate bike lanes and are too dangerous to ride without them. The bus ride to cover my 13-mile commute would take 2.5 hours one way because the bus system doesn't have enough routes going to the right places frequently enough (and I live in a transit-heavy neighborhood and work in a fairly dense business district -- theoretically I have one of the best setups for public transit.) The public transit thing is such a chicken/egg conundrum. More ridership would provide more fares and incentive for better/more routes, but they can't attract more riders without better/more routes.
Wow - I've never heard of Christy Dawn. This is the first time I've seen a breakdown of cost transparency per item like this. Pretty cool. Anyone know of other companies doing this in their customer-facing communications? Does anyone who knows more than me about clothing production (me = 0 knowledge) trust this cost breakdown?
Everlane includes a breakdown at the bottom of every product page on the website.