I recall reading an 1850's novel that talked about the demise of home clothing manufacturing, as factory production started taking off I guess.
The trade off is definitely long term quality for short term cost, not just in the seams, but in the cloth material quality as well.
I guess we need an education in clothing quality to appreciate this kind of thing?
The trend to fast fashion and now ultra-fast-fashion, driven by ever-increasing marketing pressure to buy the latest, constantly-changing trends, despite expose after expose showing its huge environmental impact, shows that education wouldn't be enough.
How would one even evaluate cloth material quality online? We know the ads for a Hardee McWopper Burger show some amazing looking hamburgers made using exactly the same ingredients as sold by the stores; a look achieved by expert designers and photographers. I expect the exemplar used for online marketing will be equally ... optimized .. for appearance.
Those are factors for why I don't do online clothes shopping.
> Popular high-quality brands include Levi Strauss & Co
I regards that as highly suspect advice.
I stopped buying jeans because even name brand jeans weren't durable.
Another quick quack finds https://www.thebubble.org.uk/culture/the-decline-of-quality-... saying "A recent experiment demonstrates this decline in quality over the last 30 years, through testing Levi’s jeans, whose slogan states (ironically) that ‘Quality never goes out of style’ . Two pairs of Levi’s jeans were put to the test – a pair manufactured between 1985 and 2000, and a pair manufactured between 2017 and 2018. The experiment found that the older jeans were stronger and wore less quickly than the newer ones, even through the fabric was much older."
It links to https://thecorrespondent.com/416/fashion-unravelled-why-you-... which adds "Even high-end brands sometimes seem like they don’t last much more than one season."
Ha. And "The most expensive pair seemed to be primarily intended for people who value style more than sustainability."
Disgusting.
One can digress into arguments about Levi's or nit pick any particular website/video all day.
But quality is just one factor, and if locally produced goods were of inferior quality to imported goods, it might be still be preferable to buy domestically produced goods.
My apologies. Yes, it did do that. The overall point is that you have to be there in person to judge quality - there was no advice for how to do it with internet sales.
The rest of my reply was, as they say, me being triggered.
Postal based sales (mediated by a web interface or whatever) would be a problem of evaluating the quality of domestic (presumably higher quality) goods.
The now antiquated in-person retail outlet allowed you to inspect the goods before you purchased.
Now we just hope some AI summary of reviews and a "star system" will provide us quality goods....?