As I mentioned in my comment to your previous slow fashion post, I just don’t think “slow vs fast fashion” is a construct that is helpful to me, in trying to suss out the factors that will lead to a “better” industry, whatever that means.

The Cost Per Wear Project is a chronicle of closets and costs. To gain more visibility into financial and emotional ramifications of my wardrobe I will maintaining a spreedsheet of each garment I own and how many times I have worn it. The spreadsheet is populated with perceived and estimated averages for each garment. Those numbers will be updated as the project progresses.

This blog will be updated with daily outfits, their cost (both retail and what I paid) and the cost per wear. Interspersed will be the stories of individual garments. It will also explore other people’s closets, their purchases, and the stories behind the extremes of their own cost per wear analyses.

Our wardrobes are at once utilitarian and and expressive, mining the space between these two ideals is this blog’s goal.

Barb wrote:

2. When you touched on “(slow=good, fast=bad)” not being black and white, it made me want to comment a bit about overseas factories vs US…While it is easier to see how a factory in your own town is treating its workers,

I think many minimize the degree to which large firms attempt to source ethically. It is also true that people are more inclined to believe a small local contract shop is more ethical and it often is not. It’s easier to hide if you’re small. If you’re big, you make a good target and are easier to hit -like the broadside of a barn.

Then Oriole wrote:

It is sad to think that most people don’t understand that clothing has been so inexpensive. I am old enough to remember that clothing was expensive, and that I didn’t have a huge wardrobe when I was in school. It was a big deal to go shopping for school clothes then. It was your whole wardrobe until Christmas. Now you can buy a new outfit for every occasion. It is no wonder why we need walk in closets as big as bedrooms now. That use to be only for the wealthy.

I didn’t think this was a rant at all, just solid observations of the effect of our changing consumption habits, coupled with our expectations of value and what value has evolved to mean to us individually and collectively. The next 20 years will certainly be interesting…the interest in fashion seems to be growing at a time when innovation (imo) appears to be waning. It’s an interesting dichotomy.

I totally agree with you. I have worked in India, and the quality was wonderful. The people I worked with loved working at the company, and the company went out of their way to take care of the workers. They provided bus service to an from the job, had on site living quarters for those who needed it, provided extra health care ( it is free in India, but you have to pay for the med’s and food yourself). They had a clean plant with light filled open rooms. The machinery wasn’t as up to date as here but they did more traditional sewing because of that, producing a better product. French seams instead of serged. Not having so many different machines meant that the same person usually made the whole garment and was not just putting together pieces. Quality was very good. There was pride in workmanship. Not to say that we never had problems but they were easier to track down and fix.

The company I was working for at the time also had plants all over the state, of those most closed down because of the older work force. It was hard to find people who could still sew. Most of our line sewers didn’t know how to put a garment together.

I think it is sad that so many of the plants have shut down here, as have the mills and supporting resources. Even if we start producing here it will take a while to get up to speed. There just don’t seem to be that many people who could staff a plant. Most of the people at two different companies I worked for have retired when the companies were closed, the others have gone on to different jobs and most say they wouldn’t come back into the industry because it is just to risky. We have really lost a lot of talent.

5 out of the 5 companies I have worked for went bankrupt and it didn’t matter the size. In fact most were huge and I thought that I would be there for years. In stead I have had to move every 8 to 10 years to stay employed.

Now that I teach, I find that young people just don’t have a clue that they have had the luxury of cheap clothes for the last 20 years. They think paying $4 a yard for fabric is way to expensive. I get finial projects made in quilting fabric all the time. It is sad to think that most people don’t understand that clothing has been so inexpensive. I am old enough to remember that clothing was expensive, and that I didn’t have a huge wardrobe when I was in school. It was a big deal to go shopping for school clothes then. It was your whole wardrobe until Christmas. Now you can buy a new outfit for every occasion. It is no wonder why we need walk in closets as big as bedrooms now. That use to be only for the wealthy.

I think it will be another 20 years before we see a real effort to bring back our industry. The living standards will have to rise in the countries producing for us now and the cost of clothing will have to go up to make it feasible for us to really bring this industry back.
Sorry for the rant.