Is the Quality of Clothing Getting Worse?
2022 Gucci Love Parade Editorial Photo: Mark Squires Via: Haute Living
Over the past few decades, it seems as if the overall quality of our materials goods has gone down. This is especially true for our clothing. Clothing is more likely to get thrown away, rip or just get damaged faster than before. This is not just a fast fashion problem, this seems to be a problem with the industry as a whole (with the exception of haute couture). So what exactly is happening to our clothing? Is it a manufacturing problem or just companies cutting corners?
2022 Gucci Love Parade Editorial Photo: Mark Squires Via: Haute Living
The main reason clothing quality is getting worse is because of the global culture of overconsumption. Today, there is more of a focus on quantity over quality. People want trendy garments and accessories quickly so they can keep up with the ever changing fashion trends. Customers want more and more without thinking about the overall quality of the garments they are buying.
Barely used garments are discarded quicker than ever before instead of getting repaired or cleaned. Social media increases the cycles of these trends with the normalization of hauls and trying new clothing trends. This overconsumption culture affects garment manufacturing. Overconsumption and the quick trend cycle has made fashion brands and manufacturers have to produce things at a faster pace, lowering the garment quality.
2022 Gucci Love Parade Editorial Photo: Mark Squires Via: Haute Living
Matthew Bird, a professor of industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design told Vox, “If you change the style regularly, people get tired of the style. They start to treat cars like sweaters — it’s become grossly accelerated. The pressure to make more stuff, of course, lowers the quality of what’s being made, because the development and testing is just accelerated even more,” he said. “One of the problems being a designer is that you solve some problems and in the process of solving them, you invent all these new problems. That’s just an inherent part of design. There’s no way to not do that. If you’re creating innovation, you’re also creating future problems.”
Gucci x Disney Collection Editorial Photo: Mark Squires Via: Haute Living
In addition to making garments faster to keep up with trends, clothing brands also are trying to bring down the labor costs including garment worker pay and material costs. Although the responsibility of garment worker pay and costs is mostly up to the third party factories that a fashion brand hires, they still have a responsibility in this.
Fashion brands can choose whether or not they want to hire a specific factory to make their garments. They should know how much the workers are getting paid, if the factory building is up to code, etc. It says a lot about a company if they have the knowledge of how low garments workers are paid at a specific factory and they still choose to work with that factory anyway. However, it is not out of the ordinary for a big company. The overall goal of companies is to make a profit and sometimes that involves cutting costs and reducing the overall quality of their products.
Gucci x Disney Collection Editorial Photo: Mark Squires Via: Haute Living
It is clear that the quality of clothing has gotten worse in recent years and it is hard to tell if that will change anytime soon. The popularity of overconsumption and the quick trend cycle continues to be a popular and heavily promoted thing globally. Factors such as the pandemic and social media have made overconsumption even bigger than it was previously. Clothing manufacturers have been creating lower quality clothing to keep up with overconsumption and lower their overall production costs. However, this will not be beneficial for the industry in the long run. Lower quality clothing just increases the overconsumption cycle and continues it.
Additionally, it does not help the sustainable goals that the industry should have and that some consumers are pushing for from the industry. Fashion brands need to re-evaluate how they can make clothing in better ways while still making a profit for themselves in the future.
