#people who are doing education about history should not be perpetuating this kind of glamorization of the past

[yavieriel]

It makes sense for products to come in a variety of price points, but they COULD still make them affordable without making them intentionally shitty so they break after a certain amount of time.

So the thing is - no, they really couldn't make them affordable AND not prone to breaking. That's the tradeoff. They're cheaper because they're made with lower quality materials that have a limited lifespan.

Similarly, being difficult-to-impossible to repair is usually because glue, riveting, and snap fittings are faster and easier manufacturing processes (and therefore cheaper) than machining threaded openings for screws and then screwing parts together.

Even the most expensive wool suit in the store I work at has pretty shoddy construction on the inside. I'd love to be working on better quality stuff, but the economy doesn't really allow for that nowadays, and I can't do anything about it.

Savile Row tailors still exist! They still do a brisk business! They're also insanely expensive. They aren't making any fewer suits, if anything they probably make more suits than they did in the 19th c. But they were only ever making suits for the elite 0.01%. The average 19th c. middle class man in Europe and the US was wearing a middling quality coat by an okay-ish tailor. The working class man was wearing the cheapest coat he could get out of whatever fiber was affordable, made by the fastest, laziest, sloppiest tailor. Their clothes were just biodegradable and worn until they were rags and then repurposed, so they don't survive. And meanwhile, India was being driven into poverty so British nobles could keep buying Savile Row suits.

I'm sorry you're getting dragged, I love seeing your work and I agree that we need to move away from fast fashion. But to accomplish that, we need to understand why cheap fashion is popular, and what the reality was of the historical circumstances behind high quality craftsmanship rather than embracing the myth of "things were just Made Better back then". Most people Back Then lived in poverty, as subsistence farmers or servants or in industrial slums. They did not have things that were Made Better. The modern world is vastly wealthier and healthier than anything in history.

Do you think the people who design modern sewing machines in plastic cases ever feel insignificant because of it? knowing that they're making machines with the lifespan of a dog when they could (if they'd been born a few generations earlier) be making machines with the lifespan of a Galapagos tortoise?