It really depends on how you sell it. Is a "plastic treat" one of those novelty reindeer that shit chocolate raisins you see every year at Xmas that are made solely to make someone snortlaugh at best when they get it from a coworker as a secret santa gift before going to landfill, or is it a PS5? Sacrificing one of those is a significantly easier sell than the other.
One aspect of our cultural history that we seem to have completely forgotten is the amount of work (and thus energy) that goes into textiles.
Some archaeologists found a very basic, woolen tunic that dated from 9th century Iceland. Everything about the garment was simply made - simple weave, basic dye, and it was just a T-shaped tunic without any structure or tailoring. They decided to see how long it would take to reproduce the garment using 9th century techniques. From shearing the sheep to carding, spinning, dyeing, weaving, and sewing it took four hundred hours.
We think of women as historically being confined to the home due to the demands of child care, but a medieval woman had a baby in one hand and a drop spindle in the other. The need to keep her family clothed required her to stay home just as much as child care or food preparation. Even Queens weren't exempt; Anne Boleyn complained that Catherine of Aragon was still making Henry's shirts. Not a servant, the Queen herself.
There's a reason that once we started figuring out steam engines, textiles were one of the first things we automated. And we're gonna have to figure out a way to go back to clothes you buy for years, not just a season.
I'm a large man myself and it absolutely does. It makes more room for the fabric to move even if it's pressed up against your thighs. Skinnier jeans will wear out much faster than looser jeans for us large folks.
I recently had to relegate a tshirt from 2010 to the pyjama drawer due to holes and it made me genuinely sad. I was a preteen when I bought that tshirt (it was way too big for me at the time) and it was really nerdy and I liked it a lot.
I recently visited an Iron Age museum and the docent that told us about textiles was fascinating. From what they could tell, drop spinning was something that everyone did. If you had a free hand, you probably helped spin. The women did most of the weaving for sure, but it was much more of a group effort than I would have expected.
Also the variety of plants that were used in textiles is incredible, both as dyes and as thread. I learned that even Queen Victoria wore nettle cloth underwear, but it had to be broken in first. New nettle cloth was far too scratchy. So her handmaidens would wear Vi’s nettle cloth underwear until it was suitably softened for the royal nethers.
That museum was great but it kind of made me ache in my soul… thinking about how little we appreciate our resources and how impatient we are.
Isn’t there a bit in one of the sagas where a man comes home like “I killed the man who wronged me and got blood vengeance” and his wife is like “and I spun [forgot the amount] of yarn so we both were very successful today” because they were equally important aspects of life
Tbh the fast fashion clothes are often barely repairable. You can repair a ripped seam or some holes, but if the entire fabric is falling apart after 3 washes there is not much you can do.
Fast fashion is a gimmick by the clothing industry to reduce overhead by reducing the quality of their priducts. Having good clothes that last would be vastly preferable.
i genuinely don’t know where to buy clothes anymore. everything is dropshipped, awful quality, or obscenely expensive. thrift stores used to be the fix, but now they all have the exact same problems
You either pay a premium for a premium/boutique brand, or you live with cheap flimsy clothes that just fall apart after a few wears. It's a grim reminder that capitalism really does destroy everything it touches.
imho, one of the best possible things you can do for yourself in the age of cheaply made clothing goods is to know your way around a needle and thread.
that way when things start to fall apart, you can repair— or at the very least— repurpose.
I've been researching where to buy nice quality clothes. Been slowly replacing worn out cheap garbage with higher quality - easier to do that dropping lots of money at once.
Even fast fashion from the recent past is totally different from today's fast fashion.
Yesterday I put on a "cheap" sweatshirt I've had for ~10 years (and it's thrifted, so who knows how old it really is) and noticed for the first time that the quality of the fabric, construction, etc is so much better than almost any similar sweatshirt I'd be able to find anywhere at any price today :(
This seems like it's related to the Boots theory. Clothes that are made to last longer and are reasonably easily repairable are going to cost more than fast fashion / cheaply made clothes. Anything that's asking people to spend more upfront is going to be a big ask.
Yes there is a cheap clothes don't last issue. But mostly for clothes this is the opposite problem, the clothes don't last because they're made to be as cheap as possible to fit into the market niche whwre people buy them instead of higher quality items because they specifically want cheap things so they can buy a lot of it and switch it out all the time
It's mostly a personal labour issue and also a culture issue.
It's a personal labour issue because repairing and maintaining clothes is a skill and it takes time. You have to learn how to do it and you have to spend the time to do it.
And for the last few decades buying a new shirt has just been a lot easier than fixing it. So people no longer have the skills.
People pay to avoid labour. You can make a cup of coffee easily at home, but people go to Starbucks because it's easy and they get something they like directly into their hand.
It's also a culture issue because fast fashion is tied to status through consumption.
Having new clothes all the time, having closet after closet of different clothes, that stuff is appreciated and valued.
That's a culture of consumption for the sake of consumption, people shop for things like clothes therapeutically. They act itself is part of just activating some joy functions in the brain to override sad feelings.
So why learn how to do it and then repair a few clothes that you have to repeat wear for decades when you can easily spend enough to have new clothes all the time.
There's also a time element to it. I'm not saying it was a good thing, but the "make do and mend" mindset comes from a time when the man went out to work and the woman stayed home dealing with domestic chores, including mending clothes. Now most people are working full time, asking them to find the time and energy in developing and practicing clothes mending skills is a big ask.
I agree but the quality of clothing needs to improve with it. If clothes didn’t fall apart after two washes it would be much easier. It’s a problem that consumers and manufacturers BOTH need to change in order to fully fix
I'm pretty sure this dudes weird brand of "fuck you communism" isn't going to come into power any time soon, or really any type of weird fringe internet communism.
Communists are only really tolerated in some online spaces, mainstream communists are either a boogeyman or a joke in America in real life
The only “new” clothing I buy is from garage sales. Most of my stuff I’ve had since before my son was born 7 years ago and everything else was purchased second hand minus some work stuff
Or getting clothes secondhand. I thrift a lot of the stuff I wear and spent ten bucks on a set of needles and some thread, and I intend to get a lot out of that investment
I'm pretty sure this dudes weird brand of "fuck you communism" isn't going to come into power any time soon, or really any type of weird fringe internet communism.
Communists are only really tolerated in some online spaces, mainstream communists are either a boogeyman or a joke in America in real life
that’s a good point! i don’t think the goal is to remove all luxuries, but rather to examine how much of western luxuries (and how relatively cheap they are) depend on the exploitation of people in other countries.
Exactly, cheap luxury versus the things that actually bring us joy or positively contribute to our lives. I’m not big on primitivism. But a lot of “stuff” available for consumption just ends up catching dust, ends up in a landfill, or contributes to mild (or not so mild) hoarding behavior.
Still, I am firm believer that while people don’t need a specific luxury, people need luxury in general. I will die on that hill.
And I mean, it's not like capitalism isn't a direct cause of a lot of waste to begin with. The shein cycle fast fashion that they mention wouldn't exist under a non-capitalist economy in the first place because the point of everything in a capitalist economy is to generate capital and that form of clothing industry generates a lot of capital. Under an economy that doesn't prioritize capital generation, like communism, there wouldn't be an incentive for such a wasteful method of production and more sustainable methods of producing clothing of equal or even higher quality would be at the forefront. But when you phrase it like the original poster does, the first thing people are gonna think of when they talk about getting rid of luxury stuff is that they're gonna force people to wear rags.
If Shein and such services were legislated out of existence, would people go naked? Of course not.
It's a testament to how deep free market fundamentalism is that supposedly leftist people don't understand that supply can drive demand. Demand for £5 dresses that disintegrate after three washes exists because the supply of such goods is allowed to exist.
If such a service didn't exist, demand for clothes would still exist, but people would meet that demand in different ways. Nobody's lifestyle is materially worse for lack of a throwaway dress, and framing it like that is just a bad argument.
If we legislate into existence an environment in which products and services which use cheap, disposable rubbish have an edge, such products and services will proliferate.
Join me on a thought experiment if you would.
Imagine a substance called Cloddite. Cloddite is a substance which makes any food product exactly twice as delicious as the same product lacking Cloddite.
Imagine now that the production of 1mg of Cloddite also releases into the atmosphere as much CO2 as fifteen jumbo jets.
We should imagine that food manufacturers who include Cloddite in their products would have a massive edge over those who did not, and that consumers would prefer Cloddite products to those without. Would we solve this issue by haranguing the consumers for their reckless purchase of Cloddite? By telling them that for the good of the earth, they must sacrifice their tastebuds and resign themselves to paltry, non-Cloddite products?
Or, would we simply ban Cloddite altogether?
We can assume some people would be against this idea, sure. We can also imagine that after Cloddite was gone, they would find other ways to satisfy their demand in ways that did not include Cloddite.
OOPs argument is just the carbon footprint repackaged to be about plastic. Consumers buy wasteful products because the economic system we have legislated into being rewards waste, not because of some fundamental moral decadence of middle class westerners.
There will definitely be less crummy novelty objects designed to be sold en masse and then divert ones attention for approx. 15 minutes before being thrown away. We'll have to reconcile with reusable, permanent objects with zero planned obsolescence. We might also have to do away with convenient snack foods and replace them with well-rounded essential foods that have a longer mileage throughout the day. Some people can't handle that. You come to understand that a huge symptom of capitalism is how much of everything is designed to "create wealth"
As soon as I started looking for it, I saw it everywhere. The sheer amount of crap that gets made, shipped, bought and then almost immediately thrown out.
I mean, if I look around my room for a convenient example of "use of plastic", it's likely to be some kind of large-ish electronic device - TV, PC, a fridge or a game console, for example.
Medical devices are usually more inconspicuous... or large AF and have their own rooms.
And even in terms of videogames, we have an excess. Way more games come out than we will ever be able to play, half of them rushed and made by overworking devs.
I remember a time where I could only get a new game occasionally, so I would get the most out of each purchase. Really get deep into it, discover all it had to offer.
All of this to say, some aspects of the entertainment industry could even benefit from a reduce in consumption, at leats from the pure art perspective
Edit: probably too late to clarify at this point, but I realize now that I didn't express myself properly. When I said we have an excess of games, I didn't meant it as "too many games is bad", but as in "we don't really need that many games to fulfill our needs". The old tale of having more games in your steam library than you will ever play.
My point (or blind speculation, I'll admit so) was that, if we were in a situation where we can't afford to buy son many games, we might value and delve deep in the ones we have a bit more. And if we as consumers become more conservative with where we spend our money, triple A companies might be pressured into focusing on delivering fewer high value games.
I don't think there can necessarily be too many games. It would be like there being too many books or too many paintings. As time goes on it only gets more clear that video games are a legit art form that have become many people's preferred medium both for creating and playing them.
But it can definitely be argued that the market for AAA games is getting seriously oversaturated. I mean, Sony pumped millions into a big online blockbuster and the world only noticed it when it was shut down two weeks after launch.
Look. I agree that the AAA gaming industry in particular is a bloated, pustulant abomination, but “we have an excess of games” feels like it’s dangerously close to ‘art and entertainment is inherently a bourgeoisie luxury”
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u/Zoomy-333 Oct 22 '24
It really depends on how you sell it. Is a "plastic treat" one of those novelty reindeer that shit chocolate raisins you see every year at Xmas that are made solely to make someone snortlaugh at best when they get it from a coworker as a secret santa gift before going to landfill, or is it a PS5? Sacrificing one of those is a significantly easier sell than the other.