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Comment by aeon_ai | Hacker News Reader

> the factory system allows certain people to out-compete the previous weavers with a shitty product that’s really cheap

This quote is thrown, off-handedly, to describe the product of a weaver.

Some of the highest quality and most valued apparel today is made of completely synthetic materials, through automation.

We can debate about the merits or necessity of that on its own, but I think the argument that automated outputs are inherently and universally worse on objective quality measures is a losing argument with readily available examples that counter it.

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~25% of packages handled in france come from shein, which is shit tier fast fashion company

You're right about quality, machines _can_ produce better things, the quote is right about quantities, in practice they mostly produce inferior products in large quantities.

While Shein is enabled by machine weaving it took centuries to find this business model. The first person I heard about buying single use clothing was Michael Jackson allegedly in the 90s and it was seen as the height of eccentricity. Obviously many wealthy people since the 1960 have been rich enough to easily afford throw away clothing (after all they spend as much on meals or flights all the time). It just never occurred to anyone outside of ball gowns or wedding dresses.

In conclusions SHEIN is more of a social phenomenon piggybacking on a hack on the global postal system fee structure.

Sci-fi talked about this forever, in the future we would wear single use paper clothes. It was not treated as a healthy trait should society reach it.

I want to agree with you and counter the other replies to your post so far.

Anyone that looks at the 'glorious past' of weavers has a very skewed view of how much of humanities time it took. Pre-industrial timelines and you're talking about massive amounts of effort for even a single piece of clothing. Deaths from exposure were a common thing due to lack of clothing.

Now the world is awash in clothing, so much we dump thousands of tons of it on other poor countries (yes, this is a problem in of itself). Even what we consider expensive fitted clothing is cheap.

After decades of refinement it may become a superior product, however the transition point normally occurs when the drop in quality is offset by a drop in price.

Generic clothes sizing can’t handle differing torso vs limb ratios etc so people still walk around in clothes that don’t really fit. Good enough and way cheaper wins.

Custom sized shirts are cheaper than many designer brands. People don’t care about the fit aspect as much as you’d think

Designer is yet another aspect alongside materials that matter so you end up with market fragmentation. Default sizing is a reasonable fit for much of the population and many people do pay the premium for custom sizing of high quality clothing.

> I think the argument that automated outputs are inherently and universally worse on objective quality measures

Just remove universally and the argument stands. The point here is to focus on the curve (it will depress the overall quality of products) not the outliers (I really like my Patagonia jacket).

I’m unconvinced: machine made fabrics go into my nicest shirts, at a price I can afford several.

How would quality be improved by making the fabric by hand? — how would I benefit from a less standard, less fine, more expensive weave of those textiles?

Machines enable cheaper goods; but the preference for buying them is down to individuals — eg, I think it’s great I can also get cheap, relatively disposable tshirts. According to you that “depresses the overall quality”; but I’m struggling to understand how the facts that a) I have better and cheaper dress shirts and b) I have cheap tshirts I don’t care about damaging when cleaning, sweating during exercise, etc together make my life worse.

Even if by some obscure metric the existence of the tshirts and my ownership of them “depresses” quality.

I don’t think it does stand. During the Industrial Revolution, automated production replaced craftsmen and often produced a better product.

Specifically, interchangeable parts were a product of industrial automation. Craftsmen were not able to build parts to the same level of precision as machines, so true interchangeability only came when the craftsmen were replaced.

As a percentage of all outputs, perhaps - But increasing to 20% high quality of 10000 vs 50% high quality of 500 would have meant an increase in absolute terms

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