- Women’s fashion cycles much faster then men’s. Office wear is a bit more stable but anything aimed as social settings like weddings may only provide a few opportunities to wear it before it’s out of style. Men can reliably wear a suit for years, but most dresses get only one or two wears.
- Women’s clothes have a much narrower size range. I can gain/lose up to 20lbs and still be in a similar size range. 10lbs for a women means most of her wardrobe no longer fits. Most mens clothes come in 4, maybe 5 sizes. Most womens have at least 6, maybe 8 or even 10 subdivisions. Most sizes are even numbers, so you might find an 8 or a 10, but at smaller sizes you may find 3s and 5s.
- Womens cloths just seem to be flimsier. Delicate fabricates and stitching mean they tear easier. Jeans have high elastic content so they wear our faster. Leggings rip easily. Knits are harder to care for than fleece or sweats.
I’m not trying to justify it, but I think many men, especially those who frequent this forum, probably have closets full of clothes that are 5 or 10 years old. Guys can wear a shirt for years to the point it’s vintage. If a woman does that, she will very often get judged by her peers.
After coming out as trans, getting a new wardrobe was fun, but... It's been a year, and some dresses really fall apart after wearing them a dozen times. Some actually cannot be washed and will lose all shape immediately. And that dress might have cost 80 euros or more. I also got some white, short-sleeved shirts because, habit, and after a couple of washes, they are gone!
And what you say about sizes is spot-on, too. Of course my shape is changing, and compared to this time last year, I've lost a lot of weight. Pretty much nothing I bought early on still fits.
(The first dress my wife gave me was one of those, a large, red early medieval style dress. It is incredibly solid, but it makes me feel like an extra from Handmaid's Tale.)
You'll just spend money to get provide a feature very few people actually care about and you'll hurt your competitiveness.
Much of the population was trained to be good little consumers and that's just what they are doing.
I'm a man, in my early 40s, got recently lauded by a total stranger (younger kid, mid-20s I'd say) for wearing a 15-year old t-shirt which had become vintage in the meantime (an Emerica t-shirt, bought when I was in my mid-20s and when I thought that wearing skate clothing even though I wasn't doing any skating at all was cool). My feminine SO probably wouldn't have received the same reaction had she worn a 15-year old piece of clothing.
That said, there are some vintage clothes that women can also wear without being judged, but we're not talking about clothes that are worn on a regular basis, I'm talking about "that blouse my mom used to wear in the late 1980s and which is cool to wear in more hippy-ish environments from time to time".
True. We all reach an age eventually where we care little for the opinions of our peers on such matters. Wisest are those who make that realisation earlier rather than later!
as opposed to what? having to wear a suit and tie?
I go to board meetings in my normal clothes, and with my dog, and until my kid said something it didn’t even occur to me to do otherwise.
I do remember buying a car years ago and my wife commenting, “At home [europe] they wouldn’t even let you in the door”. In the Vally they just want to do business.
Doesn't match my experience. I assure you they'll happily sell you a car regardless of your attire over here.
But yeah, many many items in the 5-20 year range.. plenty of ties 20 years, plenty of tshirts for sure 15 or more years, etc.
It's crazy how many clothes women have. Multiple closets worth. I have no idea how they can afford to just keep buying.
Clothes can be exceptionally cheap these days.
You might think a basic suit costs $250 and a top quality suit $2500 - but you can actually get a suit for $25 [1]. You too can afford a large wardrobe of clothes that probably won't last very long!
(I think the term is "capsule wardrobe"?)
But I guess this stuff varies an awful lot depending on your occupation, and activities. She works in the medical field so she never wears her own clothes at work, for example. I suspect if you get a uniform of some kind, like that, then you don't need to worry quite so much about fashion..
Someone once told me the average piece of cloth only gers worn 7 times before being disposed of. Dont qoute me on that though :)
Food waste is fine though. It's a side effect of food being incredibly abundant. It is the only realistic mechanism to fight hunger. You want food to be so cheap and so readily available that people are willing to easily write it off.
modern industrial production is mind bogglingly large scale. It required over 200 years of continuous investment (in aggregate) to achieve, however, so it was not cheap. And we reap that progress today.
As someone with children, however, it actually seems low. Really young children will grow a couple sizes a year. Then you only cycle through an entire wardrobe (summer, fall, winter, spring, bathing suits etc) once every year or two. Eventually they get older but then there's activities, sports uniforms, girl scout uniforms, the latest sports star's jersey or ball cap, and otherwise start to care what they're wearing and want to be part of that decision making process.
So yes, while it's fun to paint Americans as waste engines who throw away clothes because they can't be bothered to wash them or wouldn't dare to be caught dead in something that's already been worn, I think the truth may be a little less sensational than that.
I think there are quite a lot larger sources of waste than food or clothing in our economy where things could be engineered to last a lot longer and be more repairable but aren't so they will be purchased more often. (think heavy things: appliances, vehicles, tools, etc)
The most environmentally friendly thing I do is delaying replacing my totaled 12 year old car.
A car's required raw material is not going to be mined less because a few people decides not to buy a car - the iron ore and plastics are all going to have been mined at scale (thus, the marginal cost of a few more kgs of material is not a lot). The assembly/production line is going to run, costing energy and thus emissions. The car not purchased is going to sit in the lot - waiting for the next buyer.
only if a lot of people collectively drop their demand for a car would any real effect occur.
An example from 2017, long before pandemic complications:
They have even criticized me for wearing the same tie two says in a row or not refreshing my t-shirt colours regularly. And I should have two suits in case I go to a two day event.
I couldn't imagine throwing out some of my favorite pants, shirts, or jackets until they were beyond repair.
I'd drive your relatives crazy.
I do slightly better, find a shirt I like, then buy identical set in 5 colors, and I am all set until next years shopping 'spree' of $60 (5x$12)
TBC, I think wearing something 3-4 times and discarding it is horrible.
https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=-4ODDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA3&dq=...
They don't seem to have a source. Not linked anyways. Sources might be listed at the end of the book.
ETA: Ah, they have the "source" in "notes." They are quoting a CEO of a retailer, so I guess they wouldn't ask sources. You would need to "fact-check" the CEO. ;)
I suppose you could just skip over all parts of the book which talks about numbers, because it's too much work to track those down to see if they are legit.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/rent-the-runwa...
> According to Jennifer Hyman, the C.E.O. of Rent the Runway, I am not alone. “Every woman has the feeling of opening up her closet and seeing the dozens of dead dresses that she’s worn only once,” she told me recently. Each year, as Hyman is fond of pointing out, the average American buys sixty-eight items of clothing, eighty per cent of which are seldom worn; twenty per cent of what the $2.4-trillion global fashion industry generates is thrown away.
So its probably a made up statistic so they can justify their business model of renting clothes.
Still, when you say "68 items of clothing", most people think pants, blouses, dresses, costumes, and the like. But that's the fun with statistics :-(
There must be people who buy three or four pieces of clothing every week for years.
There is a voice inside my mind, "hey you can buy this doesn't cost much and let's save up later." Well I'm not an addiction but that voice actually came up in my mind, and I spent a bulk of $
I can't tell you what I bought. The good news is that I still use some clothes I bought 3 or 4 years ago. I feel guilty but I know they have been my best friends...
> “You wonder, do people in America have so much money that they can just wear things once and then throw them away?”
I uh… I too would like to know. What scares me is that the use of whatever demographic is causing that average has to be way higher than the actual average, but this feels like it has to be bimodal.
And there are lots of these numbers in the news. The "average American" produces an obscene amount of food waste too, far beyond what I feel I actually produce, as best as I can estimate it.