Clothing Quality Decline: How Modern Clothing Lost Its Way

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Good morning! Clothes suck. The question is: why? The average American is throwing away their clothes after wearing them only seven times, and now, we’re buying approximately five times more clothing than we were in the 80s. And on top of all of that, the price is going up at the same time. What is happening?

Clothing quality decline is so bad that people have to put them in rooms or outside when they first buy them because they are off-gassing.

Clothing is actually so low quality now that, judging from one video I saw, it’s dangerous for children to even be clothed. One reporter said, “I think this trench coat is hazardous waste – the level of lead is almost 20 times higher than what’s allowed in kids’ products.”

Anyway, my name is Drew. What it do? Nice to meet you! Today we’re talking about if clothing has actually gone to crap.

Also, my name is not Drew, it’s Michael, but I was watching a lot of Drew Joiner’s videos lately, and I saw one in which he’s basically talking about why clothing is bad. And then I saw the article that he talked about, and I saw that video, and then I saw like six more videos.

TL;DR

Clothing quality has drastically declined over the years, with fast fashion driving the trend. Modern clothing is often cheaply made with synthetic materials, prioritizing low costs and rapid production over durability. Historical comparisons show that while older garments were pricier, they offered superior craftsmanship and longevity.

The shift has created a gap between high-end and low-quality clothing, leaving little middle ground. Despite this, there’s a glimmer of hope as some brands and consumers begin valuing quality again, signaling a potential return to better-made garments.

A Brief History of Buttons: From Horn to Plastic

There was a golden period with clothing when things were getting rapidly faster to make, and there was no clothing quality decline. And I will prove that to you through my button collection. Exhibit A is the first type of button to ever exist; it’s made out of horn.

Then we get to Exhibit B, the second-ish button to ever exist, made really the same way as horn, which is nut – tagua nut is my favorite type of button.

And then Exhibit C – plastic.

For a while, plastic was new and crazy and bakelite, and everybody wanted it and wanted to use it, and now it’s kind of the bane of everybody’s existence.

But what it does do now is make everything exponentially cheaper and faster to make because instead of having to carve a nut or horn and polish it and everything – well, you still have to polish plastic, I think – but you can just mold this way quicker.

Plastic is now used secretly in places that you would never expect on clothes, and I’ll talk about that in a second. But I read a quote a long time ago that I think about all the time now, and that is that plastic was never meant to be a one-time-use material.

If you think about plastic in that sense, and if that’s how we used plastic, I think we’d have a totally different relationship to it because these buttons would last forever.

The Secret Life of Modern Buttons

In starting my clothing brand, I was trying to order custom buttons for the Prologue Chapter 1 jeans, but I found out that I was wrong in thinking these were 100% metal. There are a few different ways you can hold an actual button together.

The surprising way, for me, that I didn’t know about, was you can do it with a nylon insert where a metal cap goes around it, but inside is plastic, and you click it in. The other way is it has two spikes – when you push them together, spikes bend out like a reverse staple and hold the button in place.

Quality Then vs. Now: A Tale of Two T-shirts

And buttons are obviously not where manufacturers are cheaping out on things for the most part. There are secret things that you still may never see. My 1980s deadstock Champion T-shirt has a bounded ribbed collar, which is great because it always lays flat.

I’ve worn it the same amount of time that I’ve worn my modern-day high-quality basic Adidas Pharrell collaboration shirt. I’d say the material actually feels better than the Champion shirt, but you look at how they change the construction of the collar and notice that it’s all wiggly like bacon now.

And the thing is, the ribbing is nice but the way they’re constructing it is the faster way, and you get bad results from that after you wear things for a long amount of time.

But you do save money by constructing it faster. That’s on cheap construction, and we know that.

And that’s why we expect those garments to be cheap. The thing is, though, when we look back at the ’80s, ’70s, and far beyond that, the feeling is, well, clothing back then was even cheaper than it is now and way higher quality.

They still took time to do it, and I looked at a lot of sources that I’ll get to in a second. I don’t think that’s true at all – I think that’s where we’re starting to get things confused, and we’ll go into it.

The Sears Era: When Quality Was King

Luckily, nerds exist, so if we’re trying to look at historical pricing data, there are digitized catalogs going back in America to, like, the 1800s. Specifically, though, we’re looking at Sears because, if you don’t know, Sears was the big daddy to Walmart, Kmart, Target – everybody.

Sears was first. I saw a cover of a catalog from 1918. Things were very different then because no one trusted mail-in catalogs, so instead of being like, “You’re going to love our prices,” Sears said something different: “Originators of the guarantee that stands the test in the scales of justice.” And the cover doesn’t have a model modeling Sears clothing – it has a depiction of Lady Justice.

Clothing brands back in the 1920s to ’50s and ’60s had a very intense marketing scheme.

They were always challenging other brands, saying, “This is the best! We will send you a sample of the cloth, of the leather – it’s better than anybody else’s!” Nowadays we don’t have that because the market is different.

So that’s why it’s important to look at historical pricing data because nowadays we’re selling jackets for 40 bucks, 50 bucks when if we look at Sears’s historical data from 1923, the lowest quality wool jacket you could get at the time cost you $11.75 ($215 when adjusted for inflation).

The most expensive – and this is a men’s jacket – is $32.50 ($600 when adjusted for inflation).

Clothing wasn’t cheap back then, either. These guys weren’t getting 32 oz beautiful wool jackets for $30 or $50. They were paying what we’d pay now for things like down jackets.

It’s also very important to note that wool jackets were the popular pieces at the time, so wool jackets now typically trend a little bit more expensive.

There are plenty in that range but typically, they’re more expensive because we’re just not wearing wool jackets as much anymore. But if you go on Patagonia’s website, down jackets run in the price range that Sears’s wool jackets used to.

Plot Twist: Modern Clothes Are Actually Cheaper

But then I did notice something that was very odd. Not only were prices in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s equivalent to what we’re paying today – sometimes even a little bit more – major brands are also selling for a lot cheaper than they used to sell.

I found a J.Crew catalog from 1994, and I adjusted those prices for inflation, and what you see is that in 1994 their shorts went for $34 and their denim shirts $42. Nowadays, adjusted for inflation, the shorts should cost $72, and the shirt should cost $89.

As you probably know, J crew is now virtually always on sale, and these two pieces of clothing, when I looked at them, now equivalent shorts were $60, and the denim shirt was $70.

We’re obviously still working with a small data set, but I did this on Wrangler, Levis, J Crew, L. L. Bean, Target, and Kmart.

The Target Effect: How the ’90s Changed Everything

For the most part, major pieces of clothing have gone down in price, and Target is the best example, or the larger example, as to why. In 1972, a pair of Target polyester blended jeans – not even their nicest jeans – went for $8, which is equivalent to $60 today.

But now, the cheapest jeans that you can get at Target cost $50, and the average pair of their jeans cost under $40.

Where things get interesting is in 1991. Target dropped a brand called Morona, an in-house brand, and in 1995, there was an advertisement advertising those jeans for $15, which in today’s money is around $34 – which is what we’re seeing prices be now, which means those are locked together.

Okay, disclaimer for all you numbers nerds out there: I originally calculated these numbers using general CPI historical data. Then, while editing, I found out I should probably use apparel-specific CPI data, so I redid them.

But in 1994 things stopped going up and started going down, so it messed the numbers up. But before 1994, from 1972 to 1994, the average rate of inflation in the apparel industry was 3.6%, so I used those numbers now. And the numbers are pretty close.

In the ’90s, Target could source things from all over the world, which would bring the price down. Transportation in the ’90s also got suddenly better – technology, logistics, inventory management, all in the ’90s just ripped and got way better. So Target could just slice their prices in half essentially, which was wild.

And it took a little time to do this because one, I think brands are trying to figure out, “Okay, logistically, how do we pull this off? How do we switch our supply chains?” But two, they also had to find out: Do people want this? Do they want things to be this much cheaper? And if so, how much cheaper do they want them to be—knowing, obviously, that quality would be going down along with it?

The Race to the Bottom: From $40 to $1 Shirts

Surprise, surprise – consumers made it very well known that they want things to be cheaper. And obviously, old legacy brands wanted a piece of that money pie too, so they were like, “Well, we could do the same thing. We could lower the price of our shirts from $60 to $40,” and people were like, “Fantastic!”

But the thing is, then you have discount brands like Target who are like, “Well, if your shirt’s $40 and we’re the discount brand, our shirt has to be $20.” So they not only change their supply chains, but they also think, “Okay, we need a lower quality fabric, a lighter weight fabric.

We need to coat it in this chemical and plastic on the inside. How can we get it cheaper than that brand?” And that keeps running and running and running until you have brands like Temu that can sell a t-shirt for $1.04.

I read a really great quote that, sadly, I can’t find, but it was something along the lines of “Perhaps a $1,000 t-shirt and a $1 t-shirt are equally unjust – you’re just paying for one of them.” This very large pricing cultural shift led to an even bigger cultural shift, which was that there were no more hand-me-downs. You don’t repair your clothing. If you get a stain on your $3 t-shirt, you throw it away – you don’t clean it.

So now the tough part is: it’s usually (well, basically always) more expensive to get clothing tailored, cleaned, get your shoes repaired, whatever it may be, than to just buy a new pair of shoes. So people just buy a new pair of shoes.

The kind of sort of good news is that it does seem like prices are going down along with quality. It’s not just quality going down – in some cases, it obviously is. Some brands are just getting worse and worse, and the prices are going up, but for the most part, it seems like two things are going down at the same time, which is better than just clothing quality decline.

You’re like, “Was that the good news, Michael? Because that’s not good freaking news!” And also, “I don’t believe you!” And no, it wasn’t good news. At first, I thought it would be good news, but it wasn’t. And now here’s some more bad news: people like cheap clothing.

A Personal Fast Fashion Confession

When I was in college, I wasn’t into fashion, and when I started to get into clothing, I went on fast fashion websites, not knowing any better, and was like, “Oh my gosh, I can buy 12 pairs of pants for $4 each instead of one pair of pants – isn’t that great?” And then the pants were essentially just papier-mâché.

The most embarrassing story I think about sometimes late at night: I had a huge crush on this girl – I don’t like her anymore now, I’m obsessed with my girlfriend Taylor now – and I bought a varsity jacket for like $4, and it was the lowest quality piece of clothing I’ve probably ever seen in my life.

I wore it every day to the class that I was in with that girl because I thought it was so cool. And then, one day, my friend was like, “That is the worst-looking piece of clothing I’ve ever seen.” And then that girl transferred schools, and I think it was because of fast fashion.

The Quality Gap: Where Did the Middle Ground Go?

On average, Americans are buying five times more clothing than they were in the 1980s, and that five times more clothing is all very, very low-quality clothing.

And to go back to the discussion we were talking about before about wool jackets and stuff, that means fewer people are buying high-quality clothing, which then drives the price of high-quality clothing up because you need to raise the price to sustain your business.

And then all of a sudden, there’s this huge gap where there’s very, very cheap clothing and very, very expensive clothing and nothing in between.

Our Broken Price Compass

Okay, the last bad news, before we get to the good news, is that now that we can make clothes so cheap—we can make shirts for $2.50-$5 and you could buy them regularly and they’re okay quality—is that we don’t have a gauge for what a fair price is or what good quality should cost now.

And I will tell you, I am making t-shirts myself – I can’t even buy the fabric for $2.50 or $5 or $6 or $7. Our gauge for that cost is really messed up before you even factor in that you hope that the people that are making your clothes work with a factory that treats their workers right and is also not really destroying the environment with chemicals and dyes and everything like that. We don’t have a gauge anymore.

A Glimmer of Hope? The Return of Quality

I think everybody at their core wants high-quality clothing, and the good news from that is I think we are slowly trending in that direction. I could also just be getting older, and the kids are all on fast fashion even more now.

Through talking with denim manufacturers, cotton farmers, cut-and-sews, knitters, weavers, and everything like that, there does seem to be a growing wave of big brands being like, “Hey, we want to start a premium line, we want to start a made in US line, we want to start this line.”

On a positive note, maybe one brand is going to make a $25-$30 t-shirt that’s banging quality that you can get anywhere, and you don’t have to research all these niche brands online to find a piece of quality clothing. So, anyways, trying to look at it hopefully optimistically – these brands would never exist if it we weren’t in the time that we are.

Wonder Looper, for example, would be nothing without the internet and modern people being like, “What is the best quality you can possibly make?” And I think that will trickle down because quality, I feel like, is now a weird trend.

We’re in the low-quality trend now, but we will be shifting soon to high quality because Champion, as we talked about at the beginning of the article – in the ’80s, apparently they were an incredibly high-quality brand that outfitted basically everybody in hip-hop.

They were also making uniforms and jerseys for the NBA and a few other sports teams. Then they went really bad quality, I think, in the 2000s, and then they came back up, and now the reverse weave hoodies and stuff like that are fantastic quality.

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That’s a Wrap

So I’m hoping we all sway back to this nice quality stage, and even though the Iron Snail is tiny, we are a mighty snail. I’m going to try and price the t-shirts as low as I possibly can and make them as high quality as I possibly can, and although that will do nothing to the broader market, it will be cool. Okay, bye! See you soon!

This article was adapted from Michael Kristy’s video on The Iron Snail, with edits from FashionBeans, and was reviewed by Michael to ensure the integrity of his original content. Watch the full video here.