> Anyone can make the choice to spend a similarly large amount of their income on clothing the way people did 200 years ago

You really can't. That price/quality point basically does not exist anymore

What's worse is that we have "designer brands" that charge the higher price point but are the exact same low quality as the lower price point stuff. Actual midrange quality just plain does not exist

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simianwords 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The simple reason is that there isn't a market for it. If there were, we would see it.

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IncreasePosts 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure it does, you just need to get something custom/bespoke/made to measure.

Take your yearly clothing expenditure and multiply it by 10. And then, just like people 200 years ago, be content with 2 to 4 compete outfits. And then stop buying clothes yearly and go more on 10+ year cycle, where you use your funds to mend clothes instead of replacing them.

Even if you only spend $300 on clothes per year, doing it the old school way means you can spend about $15,000 on 2-4 outfits and save the other $15,000 for mending and cleaning over the next 10 years.

I guarantee you you can find a high quality custom outfit for $5000.

	▲	filleduchaos 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It is precisely because I both make and buy custom apparel that I will always push back on people proudly announcing that the Luddites were wrong because they can buy clothes that are worse than rags for a few dollars today. I have actually felt and worked with quality textiles which is why it's crystal clear to me that the slop the modern garment industry produces (and I mean that very literally, a lot of these clothes straight-up lose their structural integrity after a few routine laundry cycles) is not "efficiency". The fact that I live in a region that becomes the ultimate landfill for all of this slop when westerners discard it, doesn't help either.