If you RtFA, you would see that she considers resellers, and points out that most clothes that are fashionable- especially for women, who are always judged more harshly in this sort of situation- don't hold up to wear and washing very well. One of the categories is specifically described as "ultra-cheap items that obviously wouldn’t survive machine washing but that would cost more to dry-clean than they did to buy." She also considers the larger point that "the resale economy, too, has boomed, and you can find new buyers for your old clothes on a slew of resale websites and apps, including eBay, Poshmark, Depop, and Facebook Marketplace." Reselling, however, well, falls into exactly the same consumerist trap that you started out proclaiming was the problem: "But the bigger issue, Le Zotte and Bédat both cautioned, is that resale apps and services aren’t really a bulwark against overconsumption, even though they feel that way (and even though they’re often marketed as such). Buying secondhand is definitely preferable to buying and discarding brand-new stuff, but if you’re constantly cycling through clothes and chasing trends, then you’re still just as much caught in the teeth of the fashion system as the rest of us."

The lesson that I took from this article is that being a male computer engineer[1], and thus having social approval to look however the hell I want, is a great perk that I do not explicitly value enough. In fact, it is because I don't have to think about what I wear- I literally have a rotation of shirts and pants/shorts and just pick whatever is next in each category- that the perk is so large and I undervalue it so much.

[1]: It helps that I fit into essentially every dominant caste category for my local region, I suspect, but my sample sizes are small enough here that I won't comment about that. My sample sizes on female computer engineers is large enough that I feel comfortable saying that they are held to higher standards of dress than I am.

My wife struggles with the social expectations on womens dress.

She’s a geeky engineer at heart just like you and me.

Shed happily cycle through the same few things but even as a scientist and health care provider not working in, say, marketing she gets judged hard on her clothes.

It’s cost her promotions.

It sucks and thank you for recognizing one of our subconscious privileges.

I'm sure i'll be downvoted for this, but I think that this was solved for men many generations ago with the implementation of the a uniform, uniform.

We're not in a time in history where this is considered an acceptable solution for women, as we (species) are all about expressing individuality.

> I'm sure i'll be downvoted for this, but I think that this was solved for men many generations ago with the implementation of the a uniform, uniform.

The range of variations in acceptable men's dress may be much narrower, and men may be less likely to be viewed negatively for consistently choosing near-identical points within the range, but there are pretty specific expectations for men which change over time and in different contexts and subcultures, and men are still judged very harshly for not making contextually correct selections.

I once wore some very relaxing Indian pants to work, and would get stopped in the hallway with comments like “Wow, those pants are so.. it’s amazing men can wear these things!” — it was meant positively, encouraging, andbefuddled, but I didn’t wear them for attention.

School uniforms and strong dress codes are great equalizers in schools too.

Uniforms aren't given the respect they deserve.

This comes down to a striking difference between what we might call "fashion" norms and "formality" norms that's often lost on people who don't naturally conform to either.

It's semi-widely understood that fashion norms are purposefully exclusionary, that changing routinely and unpredictably imposes ongoing costs that keep outgroups out.

"Formality" norms are not like this. They don't tend to change particularly quickly (though which norm is preferred in a given "context" can change if the context flip-flops), and they're not normally intended to be hard to "follow". They substitute for formal induction as a way to signal that, yes, while I don't actually know any of you, I share enough basic culture with you that we can reasonably expect to be communicating with other in ways that we both know how to deal with. (This is something you get to feel strongly when you try to work your way into doing business with people with whom you don't share enough basic culture to reasonably expect to be communicating on the same wavelength.)

And yes, some people do get left out that the rigors of the norm, but the alternative to having formality norms isn't that everyone is now willing to deal with everyone else. If people aren't openly advertising what social protocols they're ready to speak, you're still going to have to negotiate them once you get to the meeting, with substantial chance of failure. The alternative looks more like refusing to deal with people who you can't find someone you trust to vouch for, which, well, is indeed what tends to happen when trying to do business cross-culturally.

> I think the natural end point for heavily worn clothes would be as a rag?

This used to be a super-common middle class (and under, I suppose) habit, at least in the US.

But synthetics make shitty rags, so that rules out a high percentage of modern cheap clothes of the sort that don't tend to get repaired or sold used, and material costs are so low that more people can easily afford to just buy cotton rags that'll perform better than strips of denim or old cotton t-shirts. Plus I don't think people do things that call for nigh-disposable cloth rags as much anymore (in our house they were mostly used for cleaning up engine grease or motor oil, but folks worked on their own cars and lawnmowers and such a lot more back then, and they were all ICE, not electric)

> I think the natural end point for heavily worn clothes would be as a rag?

This is what I do, but I read somewhere that old clothes make bad rags due to losing texture over the years of use and washing and especially fabric conditioner making clothes progressively less water absorbent.