i hated that "all men think about is the Roman empire" meme bc like, literally all of the Latinists I know are women who talk about Roman senators like they're members of a boy band.

"Roman empire is a male interest" you would not believe the shit bitches are saying about Marcus Tullius Cicero.

As a woman studying classics I can confirm that Cicero is the shit.

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post

…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment

likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post

i need all the help i can get for finals

Hey so

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

This might be the real one, y’all.

Reblogging to spread the luck and the good fortune

I'm so pissed right now. I know that fabric has been declining in quality for a while but I just bought new pajamas from kmart and they are literally see through. Not just through one layer of fabric either; I can see through the leg, that is, through 2 layers of fabric. These aren't clothes. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have strained soup through cheesecloth thicker than these pants. These are men's flannel pajamas, the kind people wear in winter, and they are made if shittier thinner fabric than even the most bargain bin bullshit halloween costumes. This "flannel" feels like plastic and is thinner than a chux wipe. Why is this even for sale.

I buy almost exclusively from kmart because I don't have a car and they deliver to my house for free, but this might be the last fucking straw. All of their clothing is about half as thick as it should be but this is a new low, it is physically not possible to make the fabric any shittier than this. I think I'm done with kmart now, for clothing at least.

This is literally why most of my clothes are from Goodwill. The decline in fabric quality has become so steep so quick that, well...let me put it this way, I'm literally packing a box for Goodwill right now (as in, there is a basket in front of me that's getting folded in, I mean RIGHT NOW) and I just put in a skirt from 2008 because it no longer fits me but it's still perfectly good. IT'S SIXTEEN YEARS OLD. Meanwhile tank tops I got three years ago at Walmart are ready for the bin. I'd rather wear used and potentially unfashionable vintage that holds up.

I'm currently taking psychic damage on a daily basis trying to find a new pair of sweatpants that feel right

#real#the reason my entire wardrobe is from the thrift store

Everything in the op shops in my town is also stuff from Kmart.

#id study how this is due to fast fashion and the quickening pace of clothing trends lifted up then torn down by popular figures#as well as the inherent greed of companies abusing people who cannot afford higher quality clothing by selling them pure sludge to make#prices more desirable in this age of economic struggle but im not the right person to do that#still forever angry tho like WHY are modern clothes so Useless

Fast fashion is a symptom of the same problem (the more often they can get you to update your wardrobe, the better), but the cause is very simple -- shitty fabric is cheaper. Thinner fabric is cheaper, fabric with shorter fibre lengths is cheaper, the more plastic you can get in the fabric the cheaper it is, and paying the workers less per garment or increasing their quotas (thus forcing them to rush, skip double stitching, and overlook small defects) is cheaper. Getting as many clothing pieces out of as little fabric as possible, even if it means the warp and weft are at a weird angle, is cheaper. Not putting linings in clothing or reinforcing stress points is cheaper, so nothing has a lining or is properly reinforced any more. The company must get more profitable every year, so the goods must either be cheaper to acquire or more expensive to sell every year. It's just shrinkflation.

To a free market proponent this shouldn't be a problem, because if the clothes are too shitty then the customers will just buy from somewhere with better clothing and the problem will self-correct, right? Except that doesn't work when everyone is doing it. When every affordable chain store is putting out shittier, flimsier clothing for the same price every year, and when the fabric stores are selling equally shitty fabric (and only a minority of the customers would have time to sew anyway), and the op shops are full of shitty clothes abandoned by frustrated customers from the affordable chain stores, who else can the customer buy from? If the good quality clothing even exists in their area any more, if they can even save up to buy it, how are they to know where to find it? Expensive stuff is very often made of shitty bullshit that falls apart in two years too now. Reliable brands are constantly changing hands and becoming unreliable, four fifths of artisans out there carefully making high quality clothes are just dropshippers selling you the stuff that even kmart wouldn't take. It's not technically a monopoly but it has the same effect as one -- if you take away the customer's other options, you can exploit them as much as you want.

They're selling us shittier and shittier clothes every year... because they can.

I noticed this from Kmart too. I could see straight through my shorts. Like, I can fucking read through them.

I went to the op shop to look for flannos this winter, and I didn't get anything because 1 they were all the same exact ones that were for sale at Kmart (shit quality, ugly colours) and 2 they were THE SAME PRICE AS A NEW ONE FROM KMART!!!

I genuinely think the answer to this is going back to community making. Not even necessarily selling, you know? Maybe my neighbor makes me some yarn and I make us both sweaters.

The issue is, I’m a sewist. And I have no idea how fabric is actually made, beyond a vague sense that it’s perhaps done on a loom.

Is it just easier to crochet or knit things than to attempt to make or source actual fabric?

It can take literal months to crochet or knit a jumper. It takes longer to weave fabric on a loom. There's a reason why pre-industrial fabric was so precious and a reason why pre-industrial women spent the vast majority of their 'free time' sewing, spinning or weaving -- it is an unbelievably labour-intensive procedure that, in a modern society with the way our days are structured, would be next to impossible for the vast majority of people.

So, no, we can't replace factory fabrics with hand woven or knitted stuff. Even if we could, the problem goes all the way down -- non-plastic yarn gets sold at shorter and shorter fibre lengths, and dear god is spinning your own a slow process. People do make clothing 'from scratch' as a hobby or small side business (I just put down the vest I'm crocheting to type this), but replacing all the shitty clothing, shitty sheets, shitty towels, and various other kinds of shitty fabrics in our lives with handmade fabric is simply not feasible. (And of course, crochet, knitting and weaving all produce different sorts of fabrics that have different uses.)

I'm going to put a number on @derinthescarletpescatarian's wonderful explanation.

I'm a weaver/spinner. I just recently wove someone a scarf, I processed and spun about half the yarn I used, the other half was commercial yarn from a local dyer (so very high quality). This took me 30 hours and cost about $40 in materials. FOR A SCARF. I asked for $80 for it which I was perfectly happy with as a hobbiest but which works out to ~$1.33 CAD per hour.

It is functionally impossible for handproduced textiles to be both ethically produced and accessible.

As a seamster and a historical fashion nerd, I'm going to add something here. If we were to move back to hand making stuff, and thus each item being made for much more money but being made to last ... we're going to have to change the way we wear clothing.

One of the major reasons that people wore so many layers in the past was because each item of clothing was precious. A related reason was that washing clothes was very labour intensive, but even without that being true, washing still provides minor damage to clothing from abrasion and so on; it's why wearing polyester and other synthetic fibres shed microplastics into the water.

If you want clothing to last, you put layers between your skin and that clothing. People wore linen undergarments, and later cotton, and these layers would soak up sweat and skin oils, keeping your outer layers much cleaner, so the outer layers might need spot cleaning occasionally, rather than proper cleaning once each wear. You'd expect the under layers to wear out faster (although I understand that historical linen, rather than the poorly made mechanically produced modern linen, could take a fair beating), and the top layers would last – ideally – for years. Long enough that they're not discarded, but instead remade into something new, either for yourself (by changing trimmings or swapping bodices or similar changes) or for a younger member of the family.

(If you were wealthy, a largesse you might provide servants would be to hand down your gowns or suits when there's still a bit of wear in them, rather than just discarding them when you wanted the newest fashions.)

So: underwear that covers a lot more skin than a G-string and bra, and fewer items of outer clothing, which are treated more carefully than the way we currently do.

It’s a very different approach to clothing, both a change of how we wear clothing and how we think of owning and acquiring it.

Making fabric is expensive and time-consuming and requires specialized tools. There's reasons we pushed all that into factories.

And while it is harder to find good fabric these days, it's not as difficult as it is to find good clothes.

We can't effectively make our own clothes from wool and linen and cotton and so on. But we COULD sew them from fabric. (Comes with the same issues mentioned above. You want them to last, so they get linings; you expect not to wash outerwear after every wearing; you learn to repair and repurpose clothing.)

As late as the 70s, making clothing wasn't a hobby thing. It wasn't everyone, but a lot of middle-class families had a sewing machine and Mom made at least some of the family's clothing. I know I once saw an article on how and when the shift from "make clothing" to "buy clothing" happened, but of course it's impossible to find with today's search engines. (I can now find articles about fast fashion, but nothing that tells me when the majority of clothing in the US was made at home instead of bought pre-made.)

As someone who also is not enjoying shopping for sweatpants (and is pleasantly surprised that his fuzzy jammies that he bought last-minute is actually surviving a 2nd winter) I can empathize.

Not to oversimplify the issue, but I feel like the conversation could benefit from the fast/good/cheap triangle

Capitalism has decided the way to go is picking fast and cheap to profit off of volume, and then scaling the two points up as best they can to maximize those profits.

For fashion, I imagine most buyers will prefer fast and cheap, because unless you are in the process of building a specific full wardrobe (which you might when you join certain professions, for example) you are generally just looking to replace your clothes, and not having clothes is not an option.

We've been doing fast and cheap for decades. It's been fine. The clothes we were getting ten years ago were fast and cheap. No complaints except for the horrible labour practices (which existed then and exist now; they're not relevant to this particular discussion, having not changed, although they are also something that needs addressing and it's frankly embarrassing for us as a species that sweatshops, indentured service and slave labour are so prevalent).

Fast and cheap can work, it has worked, it's been great. Factory-produced fabric is great. It's worked well except for all the horrible labour practices, seriously we should be paying somewhat more and paying those workers much better, it wouldn't even have to be that much more expensive for consumers because most of the profit goes to the capital holders and if they'd pay fairly for work instead of (STAY ON TOPIC DERIN STAY ON TOPIC) ANYWAY this shitty shitty fabric and clothing construction issue is very new and not at all a requirement of the fast and cheap factory model. Which was working well for decades. And could work well again. This is sheer greed.

yeah like to go back to the triangle: what everyone is so mad at is that all of a sudden (IN THE LAST COUPLE YEARS) you don't even get to pick two. you get one. if you're lucky.

This is such an important, but easy to overlook issue. It impacts so many things. The environment, class, it even gets into ableism stuff when we’re talking about who has the time/resources/skills to make their own clothes. And it’s usually not the people who rely heavily on the availability of affordable, ready made clothes that will last.

@skycasinosprince @yearningfortheend