My take is that for the most part the high quality stuff is, inflation adjusted, similarly priced, but the market is now saturated with an enormous amount of cheap stuff.

The $5-$10 shirts you can buy off Amazon would be literal pennies back then. You couldn't get clothing for pennies in the 1970s.

This is a place where you have to be extremely aware of survivor bias.

You also have to be very careful about inflation adjusted dollars vs actual wealth values. For instance the median income in the US in 1933 was between $500 and $1000. Inflation adjusted that’s between 15 and 30k but our median income now is much higher than that.

Anecdotally my grandmother felt she was wealthy compared to her peers in the 1930s because her family could buy a dress per person per year from the Sears catalog.

Most of the examples I’ve found that approach the originals in quality are $200 or more. I want to know if anyone tracks one down for less than $150, because I’d likely own 2-3 of them before the year’s out if they do. 8x the supposedly inflation-adjusted price of the original would be, from what I can tell, a bargain.

Your note that a dress per year felt like a lot is exactly my point: if I had to pay $150 per blue-collar work shirt I’d feel like I was doing pretty great if I could responsibly buy a couple per year. IOW, buying similar quality goods, our alleged improvements in QOL are significantly diminished.

[edit] if you look into what decently-constructed (not even finely-made! Just, like, not shit) dresses made with fabrics that aren’t mostly or entirely plastic cost, they’re hundreds of dollars today, even for fairly simple ones, especially midi-length or longer (as there’s more fabric than in a mini)

And as a reminder blue collar work was _an improvement_ over the default which was agricultural work. Most workers in the US could not afford to buy clothing from a catalog in the 1930s.

The dress comparison was as opposed to her peer group who wore clothes made out of seed bags.

I do get that the specific type I called out might have some functional equivalent that's simply a different style & material but is just as good, but not that cheap, they don't. Under $150, probably, sure. Under $50? No.

This suggests that the cost of clothing has inflated at more like 3x the nominal inflation rate, despite the existence of $18 (or cheaper!) shirts—the inflation was eaten up by worsening quality, rather than showing up in prices, but like for like, even with a generous "functional equivalent" accounting, the change was more like $0.79 -> $50+ than $0.79 -> ~$18—your "equivalent" dollar under the latter calculation in-fact buys less.

Your own example is an interesting one because a) it’s very hard to compare clothing by objective quality b) you’re changing the goal posts. I’ve found a carhart product that nearly exactly matches your specification and msrp’s for $40. I’ve seen discounters selling it for $25. Which is getting very close to your specific target.

My pet peeve is automated checkouts and ordering kiosks. These save stores and venues on labor costs by making the customers do the work for the store. For free, and disproportionally wasting customers' time.

(In many cases this applies to self-service in general.)

Based on what I’ve heard, it may be wasting time somewhere like Germany where the staff are scanning your items at lightning speed. However, here in Poland self-checkout is where you go to save time. Human-staffed checkouts are and have always been slow like an iceberg. Now and before self-checkout was ever a thing. I was relieved when they were introduced, precisely thanks to the time saved. I hate waiting in queues.

All self-checkout machines are moody and lock up if you so much as look at it funny. It would be somewhat acceptable if there was always a dedicated employee delegated solely to assist and unlock the machines, but stores cheap out even on that.

Now, you just need to deal with individual people being slow partially because it’s not their job and partially because it’s a lot less efficient to have a little kiosk vs a conveyer belt. Not to mention if you want to buy something that a store locks up you need to wait for them to go get it. Progress?

Also keep in mind that the quality and durability of that dress, and similarly-priced clothing of the era, made it possible to not need to buy new every season. That dress could be expected to last for years, longer with simple repairs.

Also, shoes are even worse than clothing for declining price/decreasing quality.

Oddly, the low end getting worse while prices also go up has made $200+ good leather shoes more attractive, LOL. Though I expect we’re about to either see most of those companies go out of business, or hike prices $100 or so in a short period of time, given post-2021 labor price increases. They’ve got to be hurting for margin right now.

On the flip side, four years is nothing. I have shoes I bought over thirty years ago, and all I've ever done is replace the insoles. Even the laces are original.

I'd say over four years of this a few days a week on a $9 pair of sneakers is pretty decent. They'll likely hit at least six or seven before replacement.

And yeah, I have some nice dress shoes that I've had for twenty years that pretty much look like the day I bought them. They get worn like 2-3 times a year. I also have leather cowboy boots I bought over 15 years ago that had their heels replaced a couple of years ago and are otherwise still in great shape. Both were more than $9 though. I think the boots were like $110 back when I bought them at Cavender's. The comment I was replying to:

> I can’t friggin’ believe how bad $70 sneakers can be these days

Even in the 90s my sneakers usually fell apart within a few years, and I rarely even owned $70 sneakers back then even adjusted for inflation. These days I can get sneakers for about $15 that last just about as long as the sneakers I owned in the 90s. That's the equivalent of buying ~$6 shoes in 1990 by many inflation calculators.

These are my cheap sneakers, a little bit different but the same brand and general style:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Athletic-Works-Men-s-Banded-Jogge...

One pair, $230, made in USA. Just looked it up, are now 10 years old. Perfectly fine and at this rate will last another 10, then be resoled and last another 20. These cost $440 now.

The other, which I used more often actually, made in I don't know where, are now almost 20 years old and still perfectly fine as well, tho the outsoles will need work soon.

I basically switch between the two whenever I need to wear some winter boots, except for when it's super cold, then I take out the Baffins, which are the only boots that have kept my feet warm no matter what.

In the same timeframe I've run through regular sneakers of the ~$50 kind from Costco about once per year (and I also keep 2 pairs around so I never have the same ones on two days in a row)

> Go look at what it costs to get a chambray work shirt (where we got the term “blue collar”, so, made for physical labor, not something fancy) made with similar-quality fabric and construction to a common 1940s or 1950s offering in a Sears catalog.

> How do you know they were better made back then?

I think it's pretty clear based on what I've read about purchasing behavior back then: people would own a relatively small quantity of clothes (compared to today), which they'd wear for a long time. That just wouldn't be a tenable strategy given modern quality.

Also, historically, stuff in the Sears catalog wasn't super special high-end stuff. It was common mass market stuff.

I think the point being made by the OP is that it might be a tenable strategy if you were to spend an equivalent portion of your income on said clothes - which would be ‘very expensive’ by modern standards.

one problem though. My clothing would also last noticeably longer if I was hand-washing it. How much longer I don't actually know, but some of the dresses that was passed to me from older generations have never seen the inside of a washing machine. I also can find similar fabric in some stores, so, theoretically, some clothes today would also live for decades.

We have to adjust to washing machines and our washing habits. Some people I know wash their jeans every week. Every. Week. On a high speed. Yeah no shit they would fall apart in a year, that's like 20-30 washings in a year if they had 2 pairs.

> one problem though. My clothing would also last noticeably longer if I was hand-washing it.

While modern clothing might last longer if hand washed, the question is how long. Up-thread it was noted an old $18 (adjusted for inflation) work shirt has the quality features of a $200+ shirt today. I'm under the impression that no amount of babying would allow many modern clothing items to last a long as people used to wear their clothes.

And then we have to adjust washing habits to ongoing loss of quality^W^W^W progress of clothes.

This hit me once I started to see ads for laundry detergents supposedly able to clean clothes in cold water, like 20℃ or less - what's happening is, the fabrics and colors got so bad they start to degrade quickly even in 30℃ or 45℃ programs. The market, instead of giving us more durable clothes, decided to give us more high-tech detergent.

Oh, and this is sold under the guise of being eco-friendly - cold water = less energy. Even if that's a valid gain, I think it's not what's driving the existence of those detergents. Rather, they're the "fix" to the problem of low-quality clothes, and its existence only lets the quality get even worse (and further enabling the "fast fashion" phenomenon).

The sad thing is, if one wanted to buy tools of any sort that weren't Harbor Freight, you'd go to another store and get the exact same quality but with different colored plastic handles that just cost twice as much. And instead of tool steel, they're made out of whatever pot metal happened to be around that day.

Furniture is now almost always made out of something like cardboard, compared to the real wood that it was constructed from in that era. It would amuse me as a child when I'd watch some old film and the people had all their worldly possessions piled up on top of the Model T or maybe even a cart, and I couldn't at the time understand why they were bothering to do that if they had to flee. Well, because I'd do the same if I could somehow afford dining room chairs that weren't cheap junk.

Someone in another forum was complaining about Pyrex cookware, which is hardly some luxury good itself. Apparently they've not been made of the proper borosillicate glass in a long time, and so they're no longer really oven-safe.

I think it's a bit more than that: those possessions not only weren't cheap junk, they also probably consisted of a significant fraction of that family's total wealth.

It's a good example of the question: "where is your generational wealth stored up?"

For homeowner types it's in your real property and the house sitting on top of it. A home and land are assets that also come with significant costs for maintenance and upkeep. And homeowners are in ridiculous situations of living childfree in a 4BR/6BA filling up with litter boxes, or their kids all flee the nest and don't want Mom and Dad's old place at all? Owning land, however, is a good way to ensure that a family invests in their local community and cares about the direction it takes, because they're not liable to pull up their stakes and go elsewhere.

So a century ago, and probably for hundreds of years, if a family didn't own land, I can see furniture as the soundest investment for generational wealth. Because sturdy furniture can be used by anyone for a long time, and its maintenance costs can be minimal. So you sit in your great-grandfather's chair, and occasionally needing to move, hopefully find ways to take it all along with you. Sadly in an emergency, transportation costs and logistics can outstrip their value now. All the time I see people abandoning furniture because they didn't account for how unwieldy it becomes with time. But furniture and clothing are so replaceable, interchangeable, and nearly fungible, it's now a lousy way to store up wealth.

So where's your generational wealth built? What will your great-grandchildren enjoy when the world's a different place? Your 401(k)? A McMansion? Your Prius?

https://a.co/d/eoJiMuC

https://a.co/d/d8U1Vfq

Look at Ikea. They sell a wooden table with four chairs for $199 (Hagernas). $199 for a place for a family of four to eat on new furniture, and it looks all right! That is a remarkable amount of value. Even if that won't last forever, high-quality stuff has always been expensive; like any dining set that anyone would consider "quality" would be at least $1000 new, or the cost of five of these Ikea sets.

So I guess my point is that the Dust Bowl farmers who had nice furniture maybe only had that because they didn't have a choice; maybe they would have preferred to save that money or buy clothes or better food but they really had no low-end options. And having that choice for an Ikea table would have actually made them richer, not poorer.

The argument being made here is that, if you hold quality constant and adjust for inflation, many goods now cost a greater percentage of the median income than they did in the past.

I just also don't think we're as much better off as some common metrics suggest. I especially worry that those kinds of measurements have been badly decoupled from reality over, in particular, the last ~50 years or so, such that experienced improvements in standard of living are far smaller than one might think from looking at the numbers, and I think that's true not only because we see certain very-important things like housing, healthcare, and education costs outpacing inflation, but because of declines in the quality of many (not all!) goods at nominally-same (inflation adjusted) prices. In fact, I think this is part (in addition to the oft-blamed Baumol's cost disease) of why those important things are outpacing inflation so very much—they can't cut quality as readily or as much as other categories of goods have been able to, so only have actual productivity increases to put downward pressure on their costs, and I think actual productivity increases have been... quite a bit smaller over the last five decades than some figures suggest they are.

I think progress is far more mixed—and that an awful lot of real progress has manifested due to regulation forcing quality above certain levels, in concert with improvements in industry & materials, not solely from productivity increases or better materials. This is a sharply different narrative than the common one, especially since Reagan in US popular culture, and in modern libertarian-influenced discourse that's now fairly influential.

We have better ordinary, bottom-tier ready-made bread than in 1850 because it's illegal to mix in sawdust now, and not only is it illegal, there's a good-enough chance of getting caught and punished that it isn't really a thing any more. We have better housing (to the degree that it is better, which is a mixed bag but I would certainly concede leans overall better) due both to improvements in how we build houses and to new materials, and because legally-required minimum quality is way, way higher than it used to be in a variety of important ways. Cars are very safe mostly because of regulation (they're more reliable largely due to international competition! Market pressure does work, I'm just extremely skeptical that they're as magically-effective, and certainly not as optimally-effective-when-minimally-regulated, as some suppose)

Dyes make fabric fit differently. Dark shirt will have more weight and less stretch than a lighter colored shirt. If you’re a big company, you have multiple manufacturers making the same line and the pieces will fit differently.

Having a store, you can just try on everything.

Gustin has a couple shirts that fit the profile, for instance this triple-stitched 11oz workshirt for $114 https://www.weargustin.com/store/shirts-168-italy-dark-oak-w...

Not quite the fabric I had in mind, but those look damn good, really close style-wise, and are on the short-list for the next time I sit down to look over my next batch of clothing purchases. Thanks!

They are still in business, but I wonder what changed when the last time I looked at their shirts, they were north of $150, and now they are quite competitive in price, and I worry about the quality as is being debated in this thread.

Still have that shirt, four decades later, and still wear it around the house, though it's a bit frayed from rough work chopping and hauling firewood when I was younger.

Anecdotally, I wear a wool coat from Filson that is nearly 20 years old. Halfway through its life they reconstructed the fraying cuffs for free.

0: https://www.filson.com/products/chambray-cpo-shirt-rinsed-in...

I'm not sure if they scrapped it, but somewhat recently (a year ago?) I saw that they were trying to facilitate sales of vintage Filson through their site presumably because they see the people who care about quality buying vintage Filson on eBay instead of the newer stuff they're selling.

Also, while it's certainly not the case that "made overseas = lesser quality", Filson's website has a prominently displayed filter/category for "Made in the USA". This is where you can get a really heavy knit sweater for $500 that IMO is worthy of the old Filson name.

If you're wealthy enough to keep chasing after luxury goods you'll be ripped off at a slower pace than most, but eventually you'll be increasingly disappointed in what you're getting and have to look harder and harder, and pay higher and higher prices for anything nice. The poorest people are stuck paying increasing prices for poisonous products that are basically trash and that's all they can barely afford.

Modern building codes make the cheapest houses much better than the best houses from 100 years ago. Nobody knows how to see insulation so they don't count it. Old houses often overbuild some obvious beam and so that part of the house is very strong, but some other beam wasn't strong. Yes old houses had access to old growth trees that were stronger, but that doesn't make up for good engineering.

What was more important was the layout of the house, the windows, and the ceiling heights, all being thoughtfully arranged to allow the right kinds of airflow in the right seasons.

Most modern houses in climates like seen in most of the US turn into an unbearable mold-farm of a wet oven if the AC is turned off over the Summer—they depend on AC or they start kinda decaying in place within a year, aside from being unbearable to enter on a hot day. A 1900-construction house that hasn't been updated to something like modern standards is far more comfortable to live in, in those circumstances.

(your broader point that some things in modern houses are better due to e.g. improving materials or engineering even as other things like framing have gotten worse due to worsening materials, I don't dispute, but modern house design as far as airtightness and insulation is very much a trade-off that leaves them dependent on AC in many—and, as the Earth warms, ever-more—climates, not strictly an improvement)

Gas heating in an old house for just one month uses more energy than all HVAC loads for a year in a similar sized new house. Where I live you must heat during that month of the pipes freeze/break so there is no getting around.

I live on the Potomac River in Virginia and am regularly shocked that the "come here" houses are what they left behind in northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs. Houses are not designed for cross ventilation or with deep porches, and the like. I mean, all the cottages we visited on Cape Cod in my younger days were designed to have windows open and for the natural sea breeze to do the heavy lifting.

The poorly made houses from 100 years ago just aren't there anymore.

The junk clothing from 50 years ago was thrown out.

I propose that different goods have different trajectories. Lighting is better and cheaper than 100 years ago. Boots maybe aren't.

Thanks for leading me to that definition.

Pre-war goods.

Here's another point: the Greeks used to complain about their students using punctuation & spaces in their scrolls, because it'd rot their pupils' brains; when novels (books!) became popular, academics thought it'd be the downfall of civilization.

New is different; different is bad.

1. You’re, rightfully, pointing out the “kids these days” bias that societies tend to have. Humans are risk-averse by nature and old things register in our monkey brains as better. This is all true.

2. Some goods are actually worse. Objectively. Clothing is one of them.

I buy and curate menswear from the 1960s and 1970s. Full suits, trousers, vests, trench coats, you know. The quality is just not comparable to modern menswear. Almost all of these items look brand new, and when pressed, better than new clothes made today.

They’re much sturdier, with no fraying or pilling. Most hold their shape to an unbelievable degree - one pressing session will easily last for 3 months of wear.

The viscose and polyester stuff is better, too, but naturally not as long-living as cotton or wool. But still, I have seen 60 year old polyester trousers with no pilling. Modern trousers can barely survive 3 washes without pilling.

A hundred years ago if a piece of clothing broke it meant you or a family member would repair it yourself. Fifty years ago you could buy a new one at a clothing store in a city. Now I can order one off Amazon that'll arrive at my doorstep in the morning.

Availability is less important for superfluous for unnecessary things, but for things people's lives depend on reliability was important in a way it isn't today. A coat wearing through or a knife breaking could mean death, a long time ago.Things were expected to be cared for and fixed for decades rather than replaced.

Shoddy things have always been around, but tolerance for them slowly yet persistently grows.

You can absolutely make a thick, hard-wearing shirt for $18 - I am sure someone does indeed make this shirt; most people just want different things. Today's consumer wants clothes that fit nicely, something in fashion, with soft materials and trendy colors and comforting advertising.

I can't point you to a $18 hard-wearing work shirt, but I can point you to something even better: regular Wrangler Rustler jeans from Walmart, $13.98. 100% cotton, thick solid denim, and they look and fit the same as $100 Levis. Even better, for the denim nerds there is a raw denim version, only available online in a boot cut; select the color "rigid" [3].

In another category of heavyweight cloth objects, I can also recommend the "Rothco" canvas duffle bag, $30 [4]. Brand in quotation marks because it seems to be generic Indian military surplus sold under other names as well. The stitching is a bit on the weak side for extreme use but it generally holds up well. If anyone here knows of an even sturdier alternative I would love to hear it.

My checklist: 1) material - must be all natural fiber, 2) weight of material, 3) strength of stitching, 4) type of stitch, 5) reviews that mention serious long-term use. One review by a mechanic/firefighter/etc is worth ten million generic reviews.

Anyone else have tips on quality, long-lasting clothes?

-------------------

I used this very useful site [0] to find a paper discussing household income in 1930 [1] which estimates the mean at around $2900/yr and the median around $2500/yr per "family." 2023 household income is 114.5k/year mean and 80.6k/year median. That is, household income has increased by a factor of 32.2x.

That said, household size has declined from 4.1 to 2.5 from 1930 to 2025, so that is 0.61x the size in 1930, so median individual income is really up by 19.6x. So your $0.79 shirt is today $15 (by median individual income) or $24 (by mean individual income.)

[0] https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1930-1939

[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89043221407&seq=31...

[2] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-2...

-------------------

[3] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Wrangler-Rustler-Men-s-and-Big-Me...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XNW1UI

Trends certainly do still come and go, especially for young women, but overall society seems to have settled into a state of low energy for fashion change.

I only recently ordered some so have no direct experience. The durability of the fabric and quality of construction are substantial from everything I've read.

There's a youtube channel that visits Asian clothing manufacturing expos to get quotes. TLDR the difference between a disposable $10 shirt and durable $100 shirt is like $5 in material and labor. $20-$50 for a $100 jacket and $500 one. It is extremely cheap to make very high quality clothing now, brands just decided to segregate market and capture value according to durability, percieved or actual, and take disgusting margins off the top.

I wonder how much companies spend on branding/advertisement 50 years ago.