The trend I have seen with clothing brands is most often once they become popular, become a recognized "brand name" - often because of their high quality, good design, and relative affordability. Then the economies of scale "engineers" of business folks start to scale it by reducing costs (less quality control, lower quality materials, etc) to maximize profit per unit sold - milking the brand as quickly as possible to extract as much as they can as soon as they can. This leads towards killing the brand or where it just becomes at par with whatever the status quo ecosystem allows based on environmental costs like mall rental space, etc.

Executives seem to know or are making the bet that brands may not stay popular for long as it may be fad buying and not a sustainable trend, or they simply know they can make more money individually/selfishly if they use these tactics - and hire people who use these tactics; why make $15+ million over 20 years when you maybe could milk a brand to death and get $10+ million in 5 years?

What I wonder is though are there potential pitfalls of this for consumers?

Have they or anyone done a study on cost changes, e.g. will costs increase substantially in short-term but perhaps that is more than made up on the tail end with the durability?

Did they publish a list of known poor quality textiles, I imagine that would include such things as low thread count for the textile and perhaps for stitching as well?

Does this impact certain styles of clothing that say due to their sheer nature?