I've looked into purchasing products made in the United States, and the price for a pair of pants can run into over a hundred dollars when I last checked. The price of other items - backpacks, shirts, etc are equally easily double or triple the price of other goods.
I would expect they would be similarly high even today
And the product quality isn't even necessarily better, and possibly worse.
I guess I can feel better about myself knowing I didn't support inhumane factory conditions, but spending ~$1000 for several wardrobe items is a lot to pay for that feeling.
Even back in the 1980s, my mother stopped making clothes for us kids when the price of fabric was more expensive than the price of the clothing it would make.
> "No, don't buy that blouse either," said the small woman, who stepped between Violet and the salesclerk. "Not that blouse," she repeated. "Look at those seams — that blouse won't last more than a few washings." ...
> I'm surprised that Furman's has been selling blouses that are so poor. I will have to talk to the manager about this."
The author, Gertrude Warner, born 1890 so in her 80s when she wrote that, was already complaining about the lower quality of clothing available in department stores.
In the story (spoiler!) the small woman ends up being the new owner of the store, who plans to put in higher quality goods.
In real life, we know that store would have gone out of business, as we moved to the era of "it's so cheap I don't care if it falls apart after a few washings".
I could see spending ~$1000 for several wardrobe items, but only because I don't face much social pressure to change my wardrobe to reflect changing styles, and even then, I don't know how to judge clothing quality to know if it's $1000 for clothes that will last for decades, or will fall apart after a couple of years.
I'm pretty sure when machine-made cloth started in the 1700s or so, people complained its quality was worse than handmade cloth by experts.
The trend to fast fashion and now ultra-fast-fashion, driven by ever-increasing marketing pressure to buy the latest, constantly-changing trends, despite expose after expose showing its huge environmental impact, shows that education wouldn't be enough.
How would one even evaluate cloth material quality online? We know the ads for a Hardee McWopper Burger show some amazing looking hamburgers made using exactly the same ingredients as sold by the stores; a look achieved by expert designers and photographers. I expect the exemplar used for online marketing will be equally ... optimized .. for appearance.
Those are factors for why I don't do online clothes shopping.
Which shows the importance of in-store purchases over sight-unseen.
> Popular high-quality brands include Levi Strauss & Co
I regards that as highly suspect advice.
I stopped buying jeans because even name brand jeans weren't durable.
Another quick quack finds https://www.thebubble.org.uk/culture/the-decline-of-quality-... saying "A recent experiment demonstrates this decline in quality over the last 30 years, through testing Levi’s jeans, whose slogan states (ironically) that ‘Quality never goes out of style’ . Two pairs of Levi’s jeans were put to the test – a pair manufactured between 1985 and 2000, and a pair manufactured between 2017 and 2018. The experiment found that the older jeans were stronger and wore less quickly than the newer ones, even through the fabric was much older."
I provided a link to the first quack because it showed the nature of what I was talking about: a "positive" education on quality, namely what to look for.
One can digress into arguments about Levi's or nit pick any particular website/video all day.
But quality is just one factor, and if locally produced goods were of inferior quality to imported goods, it might be still be preferable to buy domestically produced goods.
> it showed the nature of what I was talking about
My apologies. Yes, it did do that. The overall point is that you have to be there in person to judge quality - there was no advice for how to do it with internet sales.
The rest of my reply was, as they say, me being triggered.
Yes, you bring up a real problem - the dominance of "sale by mail". But I think if there is a return policy or a 'try before you buy' one then the usual quality inspection might work.
Postal based sales (mediated by a web interface or whatever) would be a problem of evaluating the quality of domestic (presumably higher quality) goods.
The now antiquated in-person retail outlet allowed you to inspect the goods before you purchased.
Now we just hope some AI summary of reviews and a "star system" will provide us quality goods....?
I would expect they would be similarly high even today
USA https://madeintheusamatters.com/american-made-products/made-...
UK https://www.madeinbritain.org/members/sector/clothing-appare...
And the product quality isn't even necessarily better, and possibly worse.
I guess I can feel better about myself knowing I didn't support inhumane factory conditions, but spending ~$1000 for several wardrobe items is a lot to pay for that feeling.