Name: It's Not Just Shein: Why Are ALL Your Clothes Worse Now?
Uploaded: 2024-07-15T06:30:35.000Z
Duration: 19 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm shopping at Abercrombie for the first time since I was in high school.

Adverbs of manner

Mildly triggering because this was like the coolest store back in the day, but I could never afford it because my family's middle class.

Now that I'm here, I'm noticing two main things.

One is that everything is kind of affordable, which was definitely not the case in high school.

The other thing that I'm noticing is that everything is just a little bit shittier than you would want it to be.

I'm seeing a lot of like loose threads on things and a lot of stuff that's just made out of 100% synthetic fabrics.

The clothing just doesn't feel like this nice, firm, high quality that I associated with Abercrombie.

Abercrombie still does sell some high quality clothing.

Actually, I really like this dress and would totally buy it.

And I'm glad they've decided to start using normal lighting in their stores, but seeing so much cheap and low quality stuff there made me wonder, did clothing used to be better when I was a teenager?

Not just at Abercrombie, but across the board.

So I scoured eBay, Depop, and Poshmark for clothes from trusted brands of the 90s and 2000s.

Then I went to those same stores and bought the 2024 version of each item.

Abercrombie was like legendary for really high quality denim.

I worked as a buyer in the fashion industry for about 20 years.

The two major changes, I would say, are one, nothing fits properly anymore.

And two, the longevity of these clothes, even how you feel when you put them on, has degraded so much.

It has gotten harder to find quality clothes that last, even at brands you used to like.

I want you to think about how many new pieces of clothing you bought last year.

If you're anything like the average American, it was around 68.

In the 80s, Americans spent about 7% of their annual income on clothes.

We spend half as much, even though we're buying five times more.

This Abercrombie ad from the 80s helps explain why.

The high quality wool was a huge selling point.

They even tell you exactly where it's from.

And notice how they say this is part of their fall collection?

Because in the 80s and 90s, stores only had new clothes a couple times a year, usually a spring-summer collection and a fall-winter collection.

And designers would start working on each collection up to nine months in advance, because clothing production takes a lot of work.

They had to think of hundreds of unique designs and whittle them down to the dozen or so best ones, send the designs to the factory, go back and forth with them for months to create a prototype, choose the best fabric, the right embellishments, and figure out the proportions for different sizes.

After all that, they'd place a massive order with the factory and then just pray the design would sell.

You'd place two huge bets per year, and if your styles flopped, you'd be stuck with a whole bunch of clothes you'd have to sell at a discount or just throw away.

That risk is why so much care and thoughtfulness went into making each piece of clothing and why you could expect quality at every price point.

Even discount stores like Sears or JCPenney.

Just look at the way JCPenney advertised their suits in this ad from the 80s.

Two-piece suits that are expertly tailored, classically designed, and have an elegant touch.

They're not selling you on the price or the trendiness, but on the craftsmanship and design.

Even one of the cheaper suits on the market was still pretty high quality, which is probably why if you adjust for inflation, this $160 suit would cost $600 today.

If you go to JCPenney now, you can easily get a two-piece suit for under $200.

So in the 80s and 90s, people were buying fewer clothes, but they'd be well-made pieces that would be worn for years.

And keeping up with all the trends, well, that was something only wealthy people could do.

Pull the latest brionis and charge them to our account.

Six months of my car payments plus a car.

Then came a little store called Zara, and everything began to change.

The New York Times coined the term fast fashion in this 1989 article about the first US store of Zara.

The latest trend is what we're after, a Zara executive told the Times.

It takes 15 days between a new idea and getting it into the stores.

Remember, that took most stores nine months.

By streamlining this part of the production process with something called Greige Goods.

Zara built their own high-tech factories in Spain, all connected to headquarters by an underground monorail.

There, robots working around the clock cut and dye fabrics to create unfinished, uncolored pieces that can be turned into any garment.

Once a design is created, Zara can send those Greige Goods to their network of small shops in nearby regions where they're transformed into finished dresses, trousers, and tops.

Zara makes a small batch of each style to start with.

The retail stores can then send feedback to headquarters about what's selling and what's not, and they can quickly ramp up production on whatever's popular, restocking within days if needed.

It massively reduced the risk that came with clothing production.

Instead of losing money on clearance sales or throwing away unsold goods,

The designers don't have to predict trends a year in advance.

They can just respond to fashion trends as they emerge, though sometimes that gets a little sketchy.

For example, here's a look from the high fashion designer Celine from a collection that debuted on the Vogue runway in 2013.

This skirt would have retailed for at least $1,000, and here's a very similar-looking skirt selling on Zara's website for just $80.

Zara had this skirt for sale by August, which would have been just a few weeks after Celine's version landed in boutiques.

These runway knockoffs and how quickly Zara could get them into stores were wildly popular.

By August 2008, Zara's parent company, Inditex, became the world's largest fashion retailer.

This is also when you had the rise of two other fast fashion giants of the new millennium,

Forever 21 and H&M, which pioneered a new way to bring the runway to the masses.

They'd partner with luxury designers to make exclusive lines for H&M at affordable prices, starting with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004.

This part of the story, it seems sort of like a win for the 99%.

Fast fashion was making it so that anyone could wear runway designs while they were still popular.

Of course, encouraging lots of consumers to buy low cost clothes that would go out of style quickly would shockingly have some downsides too, but we'll come back to that.

Because we can't give the minds behind Zara and H&M all the credit for the rise of fast fashion.

We also have to give some credit to Bill Clinton?

In 1994, President Clinton signed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it cheaper to make clothes in Mexico.

And a few years later, he normalized trade relations with China.

Textile factories started moving out of the U.S.

because now clothing retailers had access to the largest pool of cheap labor in human history.

Luckily, there was a law from the 70s, the Multifiber Arrangement, which limited how much clothing American and European countries could import from other nations.

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It's Not Just Shein: Why Are ALL Your Clothes Worse Now?

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