Vintage cashmere can be pretty reasonable.

I'm skimming the article and it say, "According to Islam, if you push down retail prices with cheap labor, they'll no longer bear the use of quality materials." Which seems really ahead of it's time since they did even have polyester back then.

I still subscribe for reasons that are now mostly just Adam Sewer. Gift link.

That was me.

I am wearing a sweater from somewhere in the eighties. Acrylic, made in Korea. I don't know that I have ever bought myself a sweater.

I have a weakness for the look of Coogi sweaters of the nineties, generally I think I'd enjoy flashy, impractical clothes like that, though of course if I actually buy something with that vibe I basically don't wear it..

Those things were great, chunky, asymmetrical, and looking pre-frayed from a swarm of cats.

My weakness is for vintage Christian Dior v-necks. They're made of Orlon, but somehow they're super soft and keep their shape, and just last forever.

I'm sure that menswear guy has a 30+ tweet thread where he explains comprehensively why sweaters are so crappy these days.

Is Orlon a fabric? I thought it was Gandalf's name in Valinor.

I assume 2 is some guy named Islam and not a hadith?

There's no way to be sure.

"The First Cut Is the Deepest" is about tailoring.

I'm sure that menswear guy has a 30+ tweet thread where he explains comprehensively why sweaters are so crappy these days.

The thread of his that got me to follow him a while back was indeed about cashmere and why it's both so cheap and so bad these days. The answer is that increased demand has led to widespread production in Mongolia in a way that results in both low-quality product and ecological devastation for reasons I can't recall right now.

12 I dress like a total slob but I would die for him

This was a fascinating thread https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1737563404544397638?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ

And here it is https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1714367698854088841?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ

12: I think it's because the goats eat the grass too close to the earth or something? And that's why Alpaca is more sustainable?

I spent a while digging into various lambswool options initially inspired by a different thread from menswear guy. You can still buy handmade Scottish sweaters made from high quality local wool and they aren't crazily expensive. However, the place I was going to buy from recently had sold out of my size.

My wife then ordered me an expensive merino shawl-neck cardigan for my Christmas this year, from some Jermyn Street associated brand, and when it arrived, it was horrible. Cheap and nasty, and it felt like some kind of cotton/acrylic mix. It might have said "merino" but it certainly didn't feel like it. I think it was around $250 US, and it was significantly worse than the $90 sweater I recently bought from Uniqlo.

This is the thread I was talking about (linked from the one in 15).

When I was in Montreal someone was telling me that there's just huge amounts of cheap vintage cashmere in random stores in Montreal. I can't vouch for this myself.

I was amusedly proud when the menswear guy liked a comment of mine on his Instagram.

I bought a $50 cashmere sweater from a trendy brand that claims they have environmentally friendly fair labor practices and also very cheap clothes. The quality was pretty terrible, the sweater arrived thin and pilly. I suppose it's what I should expect buying a $50 cashmere sweater. The color is nice and I do wear it though.

I have a lot of old clothes from the 90s and 2000s and it's depressing to see the decline in quality in the same brands. Clothes even from mid market chains were just across the board so much better made 20-30 years ago.

I do love my $400 cashmere sweater I bought at a factory store in Scotland marked down to $150. That thread is making me investigate whether any of the other listed Scottish mills do tours. The Johnstons of Elgin tour was fantastic.

I should have said thin and rough and pilly. There's so smooth softness like expensive cashmere.

Speaking of Christmas sweaters https://x.com/howardrodman/status/1738028657036468658?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ

I switched to sweatshirts a long time ago.

*no

My wife used to manage for a fairly high-end shoe and handbag chain. When she finished there, she was running their Bond Street branch, with a pretty huge turnover. The brand she worked for made all of their shoes at factories in Spain and Italy, using very carefully sourced leather, and a lot of their stuff--handbags, particularly--was made in small ateliers by very skilled craftspeople. I always wondered why they never made more of a big deal of that in their advertising material, as there was a pretty massive quality increase over a lot of their relatively similarly priced high street peers. Other high street shops selling at similar prices, or maybe 20% less, are selling shoes made in low-end factories in Asia from much poorer quality leather.

Anyway, she's been looking for new boots for winter and has been ordering a lot of boots in the £150-200 price range from other brands (not the one she worked for) and sending them back, because they are cheap shit. No better than the sub-100 quid boots you can get from low end high street retailers. Insultingly bad, in fact.

re: 25

Mifune had a thing for knitwear, and always looked incredibly chic.

https://www.cortis.com/toshiro-mifune-lived-with-style/

I don't know if anyone has ever looked cooler: https://www.cortis.com/content/images/2022/12/Toshiro-Mifuno-style3jpg-1.jpg

I'm glad to learn it's the clothes today that suck, because I always thought the problem was my middle-aged body.

29: Stupid attractive charismatic people always looking great and making the rest of us I mean you look like garbage.

22: My suits are from the 90s.

I bought a $50 cashmere sweater once. (On a lovely romantic weekend in Nice, come to remember it.) Anyway the sweater was good for like 3 wears and then it all pilled up. But I kept wearing it because cashmere is fancy.

Another part of the Mongolia thing is a legit tragedy of the commons, because post-communism the herds were reprivatized and the state stopped capping head, so everyone grew their herds as much as possible. Which makes Mongolia presumably the only place in the world where communism was less bad for the environment than capitalism.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is a nice wildlife refuge.

Without deigning to read the golden links, would I be wrong to leap to the silver-lined conclusion that clothes have become crappy because (outside luxury products) no-one can afford to pay the post-scarcity wages commanded by the citizens of high-income countries?

Comment bar synergy:

masterbator comments
on Navajo Sheep Herding
Mossy Character comments
on Crappy Sweaters

36: I don't think that's entirely right. That is, something that I don't quite understand is that fabric has gotten uniformly crappier over the last 10-15 years, and that's all mechanized -- it's not wildly different labor inputs to make heavy cotton rather than flimsy nonsense.

Re: 38

Price gouging is a big part of it, I think.

But also, if labour costs go up or the price people are willing to pay goes down, the easiest thing to cut costs on is raw materials.

I notice that almost everything I wear gets replaced every year or so, with the exception of some coats/jackets and shoes, because they just wear out.

I mean if labour costs in other areas, e.g. cutting, sewing, transportation, warehousing, retail, etc.

Inspired by 29, I watched Yojimbo last night.

Is the sweater thing just as simple as the profit percentage is a lot higher on cheap crap than on quality clothing? Fewer items in the inventory if everything is stretchier? Guess I should read the link.

This is the trade agreement part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Fibre_Arrangement

More on the trade thing. https://www.politico.eu/article/bra-wars-and-the-eus-china-syndrome/

So, does anyone have recommendations on places for good quality sweaters that are fairly priced. I've worn through some Benetton wool ones, but I think part of the problem is that I didn't buy enough clothes during COVID and wore the same ones over and over. I've actually been wanting one of those fishermen's seaters but in a moss green/brown. I worry about buying something like that online and not knowing whether it will fit and having to ship it back? I don't want it quite as big as the one from the 80's but not slim fit either.

Mine were ordered from Benetton. The cotton sweater I got is looser, so it did not wear out in the elbows.

For all my sweaters, I go to the Aran Islands and buy directly from the knitter. Or L.L. Bean, if that is easier.

41: Basically, yes. Customers apparently don't care very much about quality. It happened with denim quite a while ago. Making jeans thinner makes them less durable but slightly more comfortable (because they're less rigid). Adding stretchy plastics also lowers cost. Customers didn't care about the loss in durability or quality, and prices went down a little, but there was more profit per item. That's the summary.

47: I can't afford the really expensive denim but find that the thin, stretchy mainstream stuff incredibly uncomfortable, so I look super dated and just buy Stetson boot-cut jeans.

I think in the 80's and 90's stores like the gap were actually better quality than what was available at Filene's/Macy's.

Demin is a stupid fabric. I stopped wearing jeans when khakis happened.

I like stretchy denim, its a lot more forgiving of my waistline fluctuations than the other stuff.

As far as durability, every pair of jeans I've owned recently, its the zipper that has failed long before the denim. Because I guess they only make shitty zippers these days.

I tried to work around it by buying Levi 501s with the button fly, but the denim just isn't stretchy enough.

OT: Mixing small shells with orzo because I don't have enough orzo and the cooking time is the same. But I'm supposed to brown the orzo, like when making rice-a-roni, and the shells either don't brown and brown much slower than orzo.

I also might have braised one of the spacers that keeps pot lid from clanking against the pot.

Part of the problem is there is only a very imperfect correlation between price and quality. I'm happy to pay more for high quality items but now with most mass market brands the stuff is universally shit across all price points. If T-shirts are going to fall apart or stretch out at the same rate I might as well buy a $5 one instead of a $30 one.

Because of capitalism, there's a lot of money in buying a brand with a history of quality and then making the product shitty to take huge profits before enough people notice.

I haven't been there this century, but in general if the answer for a question regarding Mongolia isn't Chinggis Khan it's overgrazing.

28: I have a theory about that...

Maybe I lose 20 pounds and go back to trying to dress like Jim Rockford.

Paul Rudd didn't die?

Never mind.

I have some Jamieson Shetland sweaters, as mentioned in that article. They seem to be of good quality and they're not expensive enough for my "you are being ripped off!" alarm, perpetually tuned to 2004, to start beeping like when I pay $16 for a cocktail.

In Ohio?

61: BEEP BEEP BEEP

Yeah, that's expensive.

does anyone have recommendations on places for good quality sweaters that are fairly priced"

The Arthur Beale sweaters are great, incredibly warm and not too pricy. But they are undyed unwashed wool and therefore only come in three colours, all of which smell slightly of sheep. If that's a deal breaker, they aren't for you.

Menswear guy comes through again
https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1739411497108029629?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ

Also https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1739447224713810402?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ

Tomatoes are so delicious. How did we ever live without them?

65: Fantastic. I just bought a burgundy Bosie sweater based on that list - although they are taking the holidays off and won't act on any orders until the 3rd.

64: dick's of edinburgh is a great retail source for a nicely curated selection of knit wear. inis mean (sp?) & begg x co are definitely going to set you back but the quality is impeccable, will last for years. let the person/people in your life who will derive great joy from spoiling you know what you want & leave them to shop the sales!

howlin' is a great place for younger/non-traditional designs, even if you can't manage the sweaters it's a great place for e.g. scarves.

as a general observation - most of the low (zara, h&m) to mid (j crew) readymade brands have an up market brand, & *some* of those include v good quality pieces, particularly outerwear. but the quality fairy is fickle. massimo dutti (zara) is good generally, outerwear v good & leather v v good since they swallowed uterque (sad, as the latter had more extensive leather selection & more interesting designs, colors*), & cos (h&m) can also be good. avoid & other stories like la peste - absolutely crap. have no recent exp with the j crew upper end but their reg lines are on the up quality & design wise.

* still kicking myself for not getting my stepdaughter the best form fitting "safari jacket" in buttery buttery camel leather & it's been nearly a decade.

Like Charlton Heston in The Omega Man?

Love that movie, the opening is a real kicker

Late 70s was a weird time in masculinity.

Speaking of sweaters, I finally got a Patagonia Better Sweater. People were starting to wonder if I knew how to use a computer, so I asked for one this Christmas.

However: do buildings run their heaters hotter now than they used to? When I look at Billy Crystal's sweater, I can feel the sweat running down my back if I tried to do anything (like teaching) indoors.

They definitely do, and it is partly, like so many awful things in this world, the result of a pointless argument between two terrible human beings, both of whom live in New York. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45345518

The illustration inadvertently makes clear that, yes, if you have two elderly people, one dressed in a woollen jacket and trousers, long-sleeved shirt, tie, and the other one in an extremely thin sleeveless vest open at the front, then they are going to disagree on what a comfortable temperature is. Put a jacket on, Nixon.

65: i just saw that this morning, a d that will help my husband, but I don't know if he's addressing womenswear. Thanks all thecsame.

78: I know nothing about clothes, and litte about "menswear guy", but I do know that he does not address womenswear. Someone asked him a question about women's clothing, and he proudly replied that he neither knows nor cares about womenswear.

I suspect there may be other sources for information about women's clothing, although I'm not sure.

79: I don't know quite why you made that comment, but no doubt you had your reasons.

His exact words were "I often get questions from women who like what I post, but want a womenswear version. Unfortunately, I don't know much about womenswear and don't know who to recommend. If any women follow me and feel they have good suggestions, please drop them below!!" and then followed by an entire thread of about 30 or 40 people on X and instagram who know lots about women's clothing.

Here's the thread. https://twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1636195435743416321?lang=en

79: my contributions above def include womenswear ... what do you want to know about?

also agree although less aggro-ly with ajay that the menswear dude of social media isn't rude about womenswear & his lack of knowledge thereof, it's just not his pitch.

re women's knitwear beware of bosie, jamieson, harley & most traditional quality folks if you dislike sweaters that studiously avoid ending at your waist in favor of continuing down to conclude at the least favorable point on your hips so as to create a sausage esque silhouette. aside from hand knits or alterations (requiring hand knitting skills & a sturdy spirit) you have to wait for repeat gentle washing to slowly encourage northwards contraction - luckily the underlying tendency of the garment. or you could cultivate a lack of waist about yourself. j crew's "shrunken" line actually ends at the waist, thank heavens.

Don't you find then that the sweater rides up and leaves an uncomfortably uninsulated gap between where it ends and where your trousers/skirt start? I suppose you wear them with something quite high-waisted.

yes, and you only need a reasonably natural waisted skirt/trousers and also sweater doesn't need to be super short, just hitting at the waist. brora make a cardigan that has deep ribbing hugging and descending a bit below the waist that works great. also i'm in sf where it's never really super cold and mostly bike around town (wretched asthma allowing), non-electric biking in sf works great for keeping warm lol.

Ah, House of Brora! We have gone off them a bit due to their delivering a tweed coat the wrong size and a sweater the wrong colour this Christmas. Still, quality is good.

Different words, obviously, but The House of Bruar roadside stop is the most hilariously American thing I've seen outside of America, while simultaneously being obviously not American at all. Like if Wall Drug sold designer clothes.