As the sheer quantity of clothing available to the average American has grown over the past few decades, everything feels at least a little bit flimsier than it used to.
The most obvious indication of these changes is printed on a garment’s fiber-content tag. Knits used to be made entirely from natural fibers. These fibers usually came from shearing sheep, goats, alpacas, and other animals. Sometimes, plant-derived fibers such as cotton or linen were blended in. Now, according to Imran Islam, a textile-science professor and knit expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the overwhelming majority of yarn used in mass-market knitwear is blended with some type of plastic.
Knits made with synthetic fiber are cheaper to produce. They can be spun up in astronomical quantities to meet the sudden whims of clothing manufacturers—there’s no waiting for whole flocks of sheep to get fluffy enough to hand shear. They also usually can be tossed in your washing machine with everything else. But by virtually every measure, synthetic fabrics are far inferior. They pill quickly, sometimes look fake, shed microplastics, and don’t perform as well as wool when worn. Sweaters are functional garments, not just fashionable ones. Wool keeps its wearer warm without steaming them like a baked potato wrapped in foil. Its fibers are hygroscopic and hydrophobic, which means they draw moisture to their center and leave the surface dry. A wool sweater can absorb a lot of water from the air around it before it feels wet or cold to the touch
A significant amount of polyamide or acrylic is now common in sweaters with four-digit price tags. A $3,200 Gucci “wool cardigan,” for example, is actually half polyamide when you read the fine print. Cheaper materials have crept into the fashion industry’s output gradually, as more and more customers have become inured to them. In the beginning, these changes were motivated primarily by the price pressures of fast fashion, Islam said: As low-end brands have created global networks that pump out extremely cheap, disposable clothing, more premium brands have attempted to keep up with the frenetic pace while still maximizing profits, which means cutting costs and cutting corners. Islam estimates that a pound of sheep’s wool as a raw material might cost from $1.50 to $2. A pound of cashmere might cost anywhere from $10 to $15. A pound of acrylic, meanwhile, can be had for less than $1.
This race to the bottom had been going on for years, but it accelerated considerably in 2005, Sofi Thanhauser, the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, told me. That year was the end of the Multifiber Arrangement, a trade agreement that had for three decades capped imports of textile products and yarn into the United States, Canada, and the European Union from developing countries. Once Western retailers no longer had meaningful restrictions on where they could source their garments from, many of them went shopping for the cheapest inventory possible.
The same thing is happening to every commodity and service – “enshittification” isn’t just an internet thing.
It all boils down to psychopathic greedy executives and boards squeezing every last cent from consumers (and workers) to make themselves richer. Prices and therefore corporate profits keep going up, pay keeps going down (because it’s not inflation-adjusted) and the quality of everything is going down the shitter, just to benefit the 1%
It’s not the “fault” of amoral individuals, no. This is simply the system working as intended. A system where capital translates to political power will inevitably lead to capital accumulation. Corporations are only for generating more capital and more profits to their owners. Profits they can turn into more capital elsewhere.
It’s silly to expect a “good” version of this where the people at the top… don’t put their interests first? Like why would they ever do that? If someone at the top doesn’t fight for profit like a shark, they will lose their spot and risk becoming a worker, or dooming their family and future generations to become workers.
These people are just doing what’s best for them. And everybody around says “hey! that’s bad, you should put aside your self interest for our self interest!”.
Bro the problem is THE SYSTEM. As long as we have this system, we will always have the same people in power, the same problems, and the planet will die in 50 years. You can fight reality all you want, but that’s where we’re at.
Its not like they were dropped into the system and just made the best of their situation. The capital class created this system.
Its not like they’re trying to change it for the better, they’re willfully encouraging the enshittification of the systems they created.
Obviously, therefore, competing against the system of moneyarchy would be the only possible means of displacing its dominion on the world, so, …
… how come nobody’s doing it properly, or at-scale??
I’m talking about a competing economic-system, not competing against a few companies within moneyarchy’s regime.
: )
All this begs the question:
Why not learn crochet/knitting, & make one’s own, of whatever yarn one wants??
( that will happen, for me: I’m fed-up with things that never fit right, or are wrongly designed )
Yessss I’m am want to learn a sewing!
It’s not “moneyarchy”, it’s capitalism. And I mean, the system that properly competes against it, and was/is done at scale, is socialism.
Socialism or barbarism is becoming more and more true, and more like a cry for immediate choice instead of a future hypothetical.
Anybody who ignores the Financial Class, and how civilization’s laws are formed in concordance with money-lobby/authority, isn’t competent to be discussing what system we are living-in.
Capitalism without highjacking-of-the-system-of-laws is capitalism.
Once highjacking-of-the-system-of-laws is included, it changes to moneyarchy.
As it exists, it is a mixture of oligarchy & corporate-moneyarchy, but it definitely isn’t “just” an economic system, it is a world-governing regime.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/10/5601062/oil-curse-explained
Perhaps you didn’t know that perjury is S.O.P. for tobacco companies, but, of course, prison-time for contempt-of-court can’t happen on a corporation, only on us…
Go look up The Panama Papers, & see if moneyarchy isn’t the correct term for what the evidence shows to be actuality…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers
Moneyarchy is the correct & proper term.
As for socialism, whose concept of socialism are you claiming competes against moneyarchy?
Sweden’s seems insane: EVERYbody pays huge taxes AND gets welfare…
Don’t they understand that the more “recycling” of money per unit of result, the more lossy their economy becomes, the higher the “friction” or “viscosity” ( pick your metaphor ), and the smaller the percentage of their effort that actually produces results??
Which Socialism?
I’ve never seen a governmental version of Socialism that wasn’t the codependency-version or the ideology-religion one.
Meritocracy & Socialism … what is in the intersection between those, on the Venn diagram? Nothing?
“you can’t have any meritocracy with socialism” seems to be the belief, among many, but Sweden’s education system seems to get meritocracy right ( unless I’m remembering another Scandi country’s version ), where they simply don’t permit any bypassing of the national meritocratic education system…
Because of political-motivation, objectivity isn’t permitted in this world, and neither is practicality, from what I’ve seen…
And that kind of meta-rule wrecks everything else.
Hell, even gaslighting about “Representative” Republic being “democracy” is so normal I keep forgetting to put that back in viewable place…
As some have noted, the ones who rule make certain that people have things other than the actual issues in-view…
and that is 1 of the characteristics of the -archy regimes, where the population is just herd-animals, consumed by the powers that really run the world ( for-profit corporations parasitically feed-on the human-herd, manipulating humanity’s awareness to remain fed-upon, is one accurate metaphor )
The whole narcissism/machiavellianism of orienting government to the most-successful narcissist-machiavellian, and through “elections” making certain that competency & responsibility are punished, in the “game”, by giving authority to the narcissist-machiavellian ones, preferentially…
Reward-systems are feedback loops and have consequences…
Try convincing … anybody … that Boris Johnson is a thorougly-responsible person…
Highjacking of authority from responsibility and accountability … is sooo complete, now…
How come people can’t see that?
Anyways, I meant not national-level competing ( in a different country ), I meant:
IF you find moneyarchy in the US to be bad, then why don’t you create an alternative-to-moneyarchy economy within the US??
You want socialism, or barbarism, or maybe you equate the 2 ( from your phrasing I can’t know which ), so, why don’t you form socialism-competing-against-moneyarchy in the US?
Why don’t you & all the believers-in-socialism create socialism in the US?
Is there some law that prevents socialist businesses from existing??
Is there some law that prevents socialist groups of businesses from existing??
The fact that there simply doesn’t seem to be ANY such competing-economy IS EVIDENCE that either it isn’t permitted by government, or that it isn’t permitted by the moneyarchy regime, or that the socialists, themselves, aren’t competent to do it, or all 3 of them, simultaneously.
DECADES everybody has had to be producing alternative-economies within the US, and … where are they?
I just realized that I’m including perspective that is required, and not common.
“Slicing Pie Handbook” is a book on startup equity-slicing.
Without understanding how equity needs to be properly distributed, and … ah, yes, “Founder’s Dilemmas” is also required … when people who aren’t responsible gain authority, you CANNOT make the business/system/regime work… the ones who gained authority without responsibility effectively highjack the enterprise, holding it hostage to their whims/demand/extortion, and … if the contract that is in-place permits them that authority, the enterprise may need to die…
Remap that to country, and corporations, instead of an individual company with persons, and the same highjacking happens, especially when financially-emplaced political-parties ( and, through them, their financial backers ) are the highjackers.
Responsibilityarchy is the real requirement, but it’ll never be tolerated by any incumbent political power, left or right.
Not responsible AND accountable? break them from authority, then.
Have you got any idea how long that kind of idealism would be allowed to live?
1 week, maybe?
Socialists have the same ability to create businesses as anybody else, so why haven’t they created socialist businesses, & multiplied the things until 20% of the businesses in the US are socialist operations??
even 5%??
There is something fundamentally wrong with what the evidence is showing, and its showing that that apparently can’t evolve…
I don’t even know where to begin with all this… It’s like insane and ameribrained in a way I haven’t seen in a while…
Our current systems of law and government are an intrinsic part of capitalism. The modern state, with the separation of powers, representative democracy etc. literally was born, as in was created, by the bourgeoisie after their capitalist revolutions that overthrew the monarchies in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Capitalism can’t “hijack” the state or whatever. The state is an intrinsic tool of the capitalist system and of the capitalist class to be able to enforce capitalism in the first place.
Then, outside of the US, literally no one would ever say Sweden is socialist. That is completely absurd. Sweden is a capitalist country with a welfare state. Remember that the state is just a tool of the bourgeoisie to maintain control and enforce capitalism. A welfare state is just an idea of using the state to “ameliorate” (or some would say bribe) the working class in the capitalist core to support imperialism abroad and the exploitation of peoples in the global south.
Public healthcare and social security are not socialist or capitalist. But they usually exist in capitalist systems.
What I meant by socialism is China, the former USSR, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam and the DPRK.
Socialism is when the means of production are collectively owned by the workers. Production is slowly directed towards use-value, eliminating commodity production.
Capitalism is when the means of production are privately owned by individuals and corporations. Production is directed towards trade-value, turning everything into a commodity.
I won’t go on because you wrote a huge wall of crazy bullshit. I just wanted to try to provide some clarity on the beginning of it at least.
China is a state capitalist regime lol.
The classic “non-western governments that are not lapdogs for imperialism are regimes”.
I agree a 100%. It’s not about the individuals, we are all replaceable. It’s about the system, about capitalism. I think it weird how often people stumble over examples like this or enshitification while this is just how capitalism works. Reforms on a small scale and only for individual problems won’t work, we need to collectively decide to change the system that we live in. But people are too deep in their imagination of a system that usually works and just sometimes fails.
Ideology. The reason why people keep thinking the issue is “individuals”, or “croneyism”, or that small moral based reforms will fix things… it’s ideology.
People don’t look at reality in a materialistic way. They have ideas of how things should be and shape reality to fit that. If it doesn’t, the issue is reality and not the idea. So the fix is to “change reality” (through only propaganda, media and more ideology, reframing etc.) so it looks more like your idea.
Don’t just blame execs, we need to blame ourselves. We have chosen price over quality for decades. Because things were cheap, we could get new things more often, and so we did. The appetite for keeping and using this one thing for most of our lives completely disappeared. Now, we don’t have a choice.
i mean yeah this is true for most well-off people, but there is a huge amount of people who simply cannot afford anything but the cheapest version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
True, but not what I meant. You see it all the time where people make it a point to buy cheap because they consider the thing disposable. Even when they can afford the quality brand, they opt for the junk line because they don’t care to keep it long term. We go through so much disposable clothing, for example, that even the counties we were shipping our donated goods too don’t want them any more.
I am not sure I believe in quality brands any more. Frequently they name brand and the knockoff are made on the same assembly line/sweat shop. The Name version might be better quality but not by a large margin, and rarely enough to justify the price difference.
Yes, that’s the point of the article.
EDIT: To clarify, it didn’t use to be that way. There use to be a big difference between “top tier” and “bottom tier”. Now, not so much. If you want true top tier stuff, you often have to go custom and/or hand crafted.
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But what choice do you really have if you need to constantly minmax your life as a poor person? It’s expensive to be poor.